La poesia dell’Epifania

La poesia è inutile, la poesia è utile, la poesia non si capisce, la poesia quando arriva spacca. Sono alcune delle frasi che si sentono dire più spesso sulla poesia (ne trovate altre qui).

Io non ho ancora individuato perfettamente la mia posizione ma ho scritto (e scrivo) poesie e mi fa piacere quest’anno iniziare con un testo poetico di Thomas Stearns Eliot (qui trovate una sua biografia) che mi fece scoprire al liceo la professoressa Silvana Ranzoli*.

Il viaggio dei Re Magi

E’ il monologo di uno dei Re Magi (su questo blog ne abbiamo scritto qui) ed è un testo con un alto valore simbolico e, per me, molto bello.
Ve lo riporto qui sotto in versione integrale con alcuni link per approfondire e un ricordo del liceo:
– The journey of the Magi da Wikipedia
– La poesia letta da Alec Guinnes
– La poesia letta da John Gielgud

Journey of the Magi di T.S.Eliot

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

* la prima domanda che ci fece Silvana Ranzoli sulla poesia era “Qual è la sua caratteristica fondamentale?”. Dopo varie risposte tra cui la rima era la più accreditata lei ci diede la sua risposta che era Rythm. E oggi ne sono ancora più convinto perché basta ascoltare le due letture degli attori per capire che aveva perfettamente ragione.