Anthony Burgess attended Xaverian College in Rusholme between 1928 and 1935. Xaverian College was a selective Catholic boys’ grammar school, run by the Xaverian Brothers, a teaching order of unordained monks. Burgess’s first published poems appeared in the Manchester Xaverian school magazine of 1936: here is ‘A Rondel For Spring’, a translation from the French poem by Charles D’Orléans. It shows impressive control and mastery of the form:

A Rondel For Spring

The earth has cast her winter skin
Of warping wind and driving rain,
And garbed in greenery again
With fretted sunlight woven in.

No bird or beast but does begin
In its own speech to swell the strain:
The earth has cast her winter skin
Of warping wind and driving rain.

The floods vast, the streams thin
Spin in the sourece or sweep the plain,
Flaunting a sun-bejewelled train,
Threading the wild, the waking din.

The earth has cast her winter skin.

(‘J.B.W.’)

In 1993, at the very end of his life, Burgess made fair copies of his early poems in an attempt to put his works in order. This poem, and the other that appears in this magazine called ‘Sonnet in Alexandrines’, are among those that he revisited in his final months. In a complicated way, Burgess begins and ends as a poet.

Will Carr

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