Homer & Langley

IT WAS MY BROTHER, not either of my parents, who was in the habit of reading to me once I could no longer read for myself. Of course I had my books in Braille. I read all of Gibbon in Braille. In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind … I still believe that is a sentence more deliciously felt with one’s fingers than seen with one’s eyes. Langley read aloud to me from the popular books of the day — Jack London’s The Iron Heel, and his stories of the Far North, or A. Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear, about Sherlock Holmes and the fiendish Moriarty — but before he switched to newspapers, reading to me of the war in Europe to which he was destined to go, Langley used to bring back from the secondhand bookshops slim volumes of poetry and read from them as if poems were news. Poems have ideas, he said. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. That makes poems far more interesting than your novels, Homer. Which are only stories.I don’t remember the names of the poets Langley found so newsworthy, nor did the poems stick in my mind but for a line or two. But they pop up in my thoughts usually unbidden and they give me pleasure when I recite them to myself. Like Generations have trod, have trod, have trod / And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil… — there’s a Langleyan idea for you.