[When this sonnet was written, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy of books about his walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (which he refused to call Istanbul) had still not been finished. Indeed, it never was. The third volume was called appropriately The Broken Road since he never completed it (though he did do the whole long walk). The final book had to be sensitively and intelligently finished by another hand. The long journey was not beyon PLF’s grasp, but his ferocious care taken over his prose held him back from finishing the trilogy.]
Two Volumes towards Byzantium
“A man’s reach should
exceed his grasp.”
~ Robert Browning
His sentences and paragraphs roil, drawn
As beautiful, and troubled, and as calm
As Danube waters. When he wakes at dawn
Beneath the elders, he jots down a psalm
Of notes he uses decades later in
His capturing of long moments, years,
Dimmed eras, and millennia. Berlin
And Middle European souvenirs
Of vanished families and hamlets flow
Together forward, surging onward past
The poison myth of Vlad, the furbelow
Of gypsy skirt, and shadowed, tortured, vast
..Descriptions of Baroque cathedrals, keeps,
….And drinking bouts. The telling grasps and sweeps.