A Path to Follow with Harold Bloom
(Ed. Note: Here’s a recent poem by Ellery concerning Yale’s former English professor and renowned literary critic Harold Bloom, who passed on in 2019.)

There is no music to play for Harold Bloom
Save Bach’s celestial noise.
I will pass by his grave today
Escaping restlessness.

Too late
To die again
I know
Bloom lays beneath my feet.
A single hand
Reaching out
His fingers touching turf.

I take my walk farther up the path
Where other bodies lay
Dear Dante Proust and Emerson
And looking forward
Whitman too and Dickinson alive
Save death which has enveloped her too.

I leave them behind in that melancholy sort of garden
This morning’s frost melting
Into graves still warm.

I am looking for the Bard
The leader of the Stratfordians
So delightfully laid flat among the turnips
Where roses should have been.
I stop and stroke some vetch.

Then turn and hurry back towards Bloom,
By all the others and
On arriving at his outstretched hand
I see again the past as passed
That only the future knows of my portent.

And with Bloom in hand
I move on
And might

Before tis night
With other friends
Embrace our frenzied star.

 
Ellery McLanahan, 2021

 
We welcome your comments on Ellery’s interview with Y62 Communications Team member Dick Riseling below, as well as your comments on Ellery’s poem. Thank you.