Joseph in Exile

. . . this sullen place

Is terra deserta, Joseph, this is Egypt.

You have been here before, but long ago.

The first time you were sold by your brothers

But had a gift for dreams that somehow saved you.

The second time was familiar but still harder

You came with wife and child, the child not yours,

The wife, whom you adored, in a way not yours,

And all that you can recall, even in dreams,

Is the birth itself, and after that the journey,

Mixed with an obscure and confusing music,

Confused with a smell of hay and steaming dung.

Nothing is clear from then on, and what became

Of the woman and child eludes you altogether . . .

This is Egypt Joseph, the old school of the soul.

You will recognise the rank smell of a stable

And the soft patience in a donkey’s eyes,

Telling you you are welcome and at home.(Hecht 149)

Anthony Hecht’s ‘Exile’ [for the expelled Russian Joseph Brodsky].

In ‘Exile’ Hecht names as equivalents terra deserta, Egypt, the school of the soul, and home. This colocation is perturbing, is tensional, since to be at home in the foreign is imaginatively and perhaps spiritually demanding. Either way, process is involved—that ‘school of the soul sounds like Keats’s notion of the world as a vale of soul-making—and that is why the journeys of the two scriptural Josephs are appropriate: onerous things, but efficacious.

Peter Steele