The Ice-Cream Makers by Ernest Van der Kwast Page B

‘ Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, / The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity .’ That was it, and he looked at me with his watery eyes, the eyes of an old man.
    It was as if something had wafted up from those lines, a certain scent or perfume.
    Time and again I have wondered why he chose this poem, why he recited these particular stanzas from ‘Epipsychidion’. At the same time I ask myself: if I were given the opportunity to show someone the beauty of poetry, what poem would I initiate them with? Where to start? So many teachers manage to put students off with their very first poem, or worse, saddle them with a lifelong aversion to poetry. The choice seems infinite, but there’s really only one option: a different poem for each student’s soul. Poems should never be read in front of a class as a whole.
    Heiman asked me what I thought. I didn’t know what to say. I was young; my voice hadn’t even broken yet. What could I have said? That I was going to change my life’s course? That I was now going to open my heart to a hundred women, all of them the love of my life? Or had the poem already done so? Had the door to one of the rooms been opened a crack, without me noticing? Sometimes I think so.
    He broke the silence by telling me about Shelley’s premature death, at the age of thirty. ‘He drowned in the Bay of Lerici after his vessel, the Don Juan , sank.’ The poet washed up on the beach between Massa and Viareggio a couple of days later, a collection of poems by John Keats in one of the pockets of his white sailor’s breeches. The poems, as well as his body, were burned on the beach. Those were the days of cholera and the plague; everything that washed ashore had to be consumed by fire. The ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, a rolling green lawn beside the city wall where the wind whispers through the leaves and where three years previously his young son William had been buried. ‘Shelley’s heart wouldn’t burn,’ Heiman told me, ‘and was sent to his wife Mary.’ After her death in 1851, it was found in one of her desk drawers. Wrapped in the poem ‘Adonaïs’, it had crumbled to dust.
    Stay yet awhile! speak to me once again;
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live;
And in my heartless breast and burning brain
That word, that kiss, shall all thoughts else survive.
    After the death of his last surviving son, Percy Florence, what remained of the heart was buried in Bournemouth, where Mary lay buried too. By then his mistress Claire Clairmont had already passed away. She had been buried, by her own wish, with a shawl Shelley had given her.
    Before he became director of the World Poetry Festival, Richard Heiman had been a lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to that he had spent some time at Stanford, a place of low sandstone buildings and foxglove trees with squirrels clambering up their trunks. The governor had had his will drawn up by him, and the university’s president had also had his deeds executed before him. But there had been an affair with a female student nearly twenty years his junior, the daughter of a prominent public notary. Despite Heiman’s promise and the high regard of his colleagues, his position had become untenable. It was the only transgression of his life, but he didn’t see it that way. He would always remember California fondly. The long, mellow evenings and the eternal sunshine. Her magnificent face — Natalie, her name was — and the slender chain with the bee-shaped charm around her neck. It was a present from her father or her first boyfriend; he forgot which.
    But he never forgot a poet. He knew more about poetry than anyone. He couldn’t imagine life without it.
    â€˜Nonsense,’ my father said. ‘You