Morris Bishop: “We Have Been Here Before”

Eye (M.C. Escher, mezzotint, 1946)

“We Have Been Here Before”

I think I remember this moorland,
The tower on the tip of the tor;
I feel in the distance another existence:
I think I have been here before.

And I think you were sitting beside me,
In a fold in the face of the fell,
For Time at its work’ll go round in a circle,
And what is befalling, befell.

“I have been here before!” I asserted,
In a nook on a neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
And you smiled, I remember your smile.

I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The past made a promise, before it
Began to begin to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it.
How long has this got to go on?

[The American scholar, historian, biographer, author, and humorist Morris Bishop (1893-1973)] “was a perceptive judge of literary talent, bringing the virtually unknown Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov to Cornell to teach in 1948. ‘Mr. Nabokov considered Professor Bishop as one of his closest friends in the United States and as a sort of spiritual father,’ wrote the obituary writer for The New York Times upon Bishop’s death in 1973. “They shared a fondness for exactitude in language and for japery as well as a common commitment to literature.” More…