(For your annotations of this poem, we’re doing a bit of background historical research–choose a line or word or image and try to discover what specific historical reference the poet is making)

Ashburnham

By Melissa Range, from Scriptorium, 2016.

 

With a name like that,
the librarian shouldn’t have been surprised

when late night hearth-spearks
kindled mantel-tree and wainscot,

turned the hallways to tinder,
cindered the vellum

already almost too fragile to touch–
an antiquarian’s collection

amassed when the monasteries
were dissolved, when books

were flung from scriptoria, torn
parchment used for bootblacks’ rags.

A gospel, an epic, a charter aflame,
the only copies thrown from a window

when the librarian could no longer wait
for the bucket brigade;

the next morning, schoolboys
pocketed the black and buckled scraps.

The poem about the seafaring hero,
bound into a larger volume

of monster-tales and marvels,
smoked as if from dragon-fire,

parts of the tale already worm-eaten,
and though the restorationists

cleaned and pinned the leaves–
fire-brittle, water-warped–

to a line to dry, the story kept
disintegrating, its margins

crumbling further at each touch,
leaving scholars less to copy

of what was already less a copy
than a shadow–the original

unpreserved, irretrievable
the instant the pen quenched

the harp: a smoldering
smothered, a ruin of the tongue.

 

Note

On October 23, 1731, many singular volumes and manuscripts in the Cotton Library, including the only extant copy of Beowulf, were irreparably damaged or destroyed in the Ashburnham House Fire. Some of this poem’s details are from A Report from the Comittee Appointed to View the Cottonian Library . . . [signed by] W. Whiston. Printed for R. Williamson and W. Bowyer, London, 1732. This poem is in memory of John Miles Foley.