miniZibaldone

The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson Introduction [by translator, Seamus Heaney] Little enough is known about Robert Henryson, ‘a schoolmaster of Dunfermline ’ and master poet in the Scots language: born perhaps in the 1420s, he was dead by 1505, the year his younger contemporary William Dunbar mourned his passing in ‘Lament for the Makars.’ In a couplet where the rhyme tolls very sweetly and solemnly, Dunbar says that death ‘In Dunfermelyne…has done roun [whispered]/ To Maister Robert Henrisoun’, although here the title ‘Maister’ has more to do with the deceased man’s status as a university graduate than with his profession as a teacher or his reputation as the author of three major narrative poems— The Testament of Cresseid , The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice —as well as a number of shorter lyrics including the incomparable (and probably untranslatable) ‘Robyn and Makene’.           The hon...

  W. H. Auden's Book of Light Verse by W. H. Auden The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables by Robert Henryson Canaan by Geoffrey Hill Post-War Polish Poetry ed by Czeslaw Milosz Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke   Flight by Linda Bierds  Come and See by Fanny Howe  Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler  Selected Cautionary Verses by Hilaire Belloc Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot  The Voice that is Great Within Us by Hayden Carruth 

W. H. Auden's Book of Light Verse by W. H. Auden   The Wild Birds by Wendell Berry   The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky   The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene   Brighton Rock by Graham Greene   The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables by Robert Henryson   On the Road by Jack Kerouac Redeemed by Heather King     Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy   Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok   Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke   Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare   Week-end Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse   The Small Bachelor by P. G. Wodehouse   Jeeves Takes Charge by P. G. Wodehouse