Meditation on a Bone, Alec Derwent Hope Poems,Born in 1907 in the Snowy Mountain region of New South Wales, Alec Derwent Hope was a prolific Australian poet and satirical writer. His father was a minister and the young Hope spent his education at Fort Street School for Boys in Sydney and then moved on to take a BA at the nearby university.
After winning a scholarship, Hope found himself heading to England and a place at Oxford University though his studies did not go as well as he expected. He left Oxford with a third class degree and returned to Australia in the early part of 1931. Hope trained to be a teacher though it was a while before he decided to settle down.
Meditation on a Bone by Alec Derwent Hope
Meditation on a Bone
A piece of bone, found at Trondhjem in 1901, with the following runic inscription (about A.D. 1050) cut on it: I loved her as a maiden; I will not trouble Erlend’s detestable wife;
better she should be a widow.
Words scored upon a bone,
Scratched in despair or rage —
Nine hundred years have gone;
Now, in another age,
They burn with passion on
A scholar’s tranquil page.
The scholar takes his pen
And turns the bone about,
And writes those words again.
Once more they seethe and shout
And through a human brain
Undying hate rings out.
“I loved her when a maid;
I loathe and love the wife
That warms another’s bed:
Let him beware his life!”
The scholar’s hand is stayed;
His pen becomes a knife
To grave in living bone
The fierce archaic cry.
He sits and reads his own
Dull sum of misery.
A thousand years have flown
Before that ink is dry.
And, in a foreign tongue,
A man, who is not he,
Reads and his heart is wrung
This ancient grief to see,
And thinks: When I am dung,
What bone shall speak for me?
