Suffering and Decision

Abstract

Once upon a time there was a poet, born in the north of his native country, a boy completely at home on the land and in the landscape, familiar with the fields and rivers of his district, living at eye level with the wild life and the domestic life.¹ Educated first in local schools, he proved himself a gifted son and was chosen for further education in the great centres of learning in the south. There, as he mixed with the intellectual and social elite of that time and place, his extraordinary linguistic powers flourished and his first collections of poems gained him immediate notice and respect in the literary world. This early work reflected his deep reading in the canonical and contemporary poetry of his own and other languages, but it could not have been written without his memories of that first life in the unfashionable, non-literary world of his childhood. Then as he grew in achievement and reputation, his social circle widened and his sense of poetic destiny deepened. His eminence as a writer and his unaffected personality gained him powerful and influential friends and he would eventually become a favourite in the highest household of the land and be invited there on different occasions to read his poems aloud to the members of the ruling family. His reading voice was bewitching, and all who knew him remarked how his accent and bearing still retained strong traces of his north-country origins.