Saw I Never The Righteous Forsaken

by Donald Davie

I have been young, and now am old:

but I never saw Mr Worth denied all reputation, nor Mrs Worth and the children go begging in the long run.

Reputations have what seems when you get to my age a shortish innings at best. Remember the champion jockeys? How many? From how far back?

“He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, thy judgement as the noonday.”

Banking on posterity is an unwise investment. Cold comfort, the little Worths! Perpetual false dawn!

But merit is ascertainable as daylight; unarguable justice follows as certainly as noon ensues from dawn

From “To Scorch or Freeze: Poems About the Sacred” (University of Chicago Press: $24, cloth; $7.95, paper; 56 pp.). Reviving and adapting a practice common in English poetry of the 16th Century, Davie offers in this collection translations and imitations of the Book of Psalms. Professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, he resides in Devon, England; his collected poems have been published in two volumes, in 1972 and 1984. (Cf., on Page 3, a discussion en passant of the school of British poetry to which Davie belongs.) 1988 Donald David. Reprinted by permission of University of Chicago Press.