A Scholar

 pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli

 

The light is dying, and the clock has died;

the page succumbs to the atrocious care

that disinters the things not wholly there

by which your solemn field is justified.

You burnish them until they bear the shine

of common knowledge, knowing one black skill

is yours alone: before the greater will

all text is dream, and takes on the design

of what was sought there. Thus your word is god.

This grammarie electrifies the gate;

none pass but such as you initiate.

The students hurry by you in the quad

attending to their feet. What can you say?

You know Shakespeare would have walked that way.

~ Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets (London, 2015)

Gatekeeping and exclusion are endemic to academia, but it's not often you get a beautiful poem about it. I love how Paterson's scholar is an eerie figure whose work includes necromancy, black magic, and spellbooks. At the moment, this poem has particular resonance for me because I am in the final stages of checking over the typeset manuscript of my book and preparing the index. "All text is dream," indeed.

The epigraph is from the second-century grammarian Terentianus Maurus, De Metris; a literal translation is: books have their destinies according to the capability of the reader; or as William Camden translated it books receive their Doome according to the reader's capacity. Another way to put it (though not literally) might be the reader makes the book, in the sense that because of our own abilities and experiences and understandings, our encounters with a particular book will be utterly unique to us as individuals.