In her autobiography, Images and Shadows, Iris Origo the American who married an Italian and lived in Italy but, more importantly, overcame great wealth to live and write and to love with disciplined, accessible passion and learning, describes her brief time with a wonderful teacher when she was 15.

In the chapter, Reading and learning,  she describes learning Greek and Latin poetry.  Like all wonderful stories hers are layered, with life in front of her described as she was living it topped with her different experiences with words, ideas, people.  Thus,

“It was a morning in May, and even on Monti’s [her teacher] dusty desk his wife had put a small vase containing a single dark red rose; as I read [the great Ode to Aphrodite], its scent reached me, together with the honeyed words . . . “.

Later, Iris meets Monti in the Tuscan countryside where she’s picnicing and insists he recites some poetry.  He agrees and “. . . recited to us the famous lines in which Virgil grants to the bees something of the divine essence:

. . . deum namque . . .

* . . . for a deity

There is pervading the whole earth and all

The expanses of the sea, and heights of heaven:

That from him flocks and herds, men and wild beasts

Of every kind, each at its birth drinks in

The subtle breath of life; and thus all beings

Soon return thither, soon to be dissolved

And so restored; nor for death is there a place;

But, living still, into the ranks of stars

They fly aloft, and find their rest in heaven.

Georgics IV, 221 – 30, translated by R. C. Trevelyan

They fly aloft’, he repeated, “and find their rest in heaven.’  While he was speaking, the bees were still humming round us among the mint and thyme, but now the sun was getting low and they were withdrawing into their hives . . . for the first time I became aware of poetry as something not disconnected from life . . . ‘.

A short while later Iris lost her teacher Monti who died in 1917 of the Spanish flu and she went to another teacher to learn but it was not the same; “Only now I was like a plant without roots . . .”.

While her new teacher was a great scholar the poetry was gone:  ”But, while I was of course impressed by Festa’s scholarship and by his dry, penetrating comments, the old fire was not kindled again.  I had lost my guru.”

That word, ‘guru’, strikes me now; it was not in common use when Iris wrote that book, in 1970.

And two other things strike me.

How fortunate we may be when life blesses us with words, poetry and then mixes it up like concrete with what’s happening in front of our eyes.  I walked west up the road today as the sun was setting low in front of me; it’s been a tough day.  Yet, the light was so beautiful, such a light rain of little drops of beautiful light – I was almost swept away from the turmoil in me by this thing we call ‘Earth’.  We live on it; now, there’s an opportunity, yes?

The other thing was how the poet Virgil felt the need to bless bees with a dash of divinity.

You see them fly, as I do from the hive out  in my back garden, the tiny little black fly-like critters; such focus, such certainty of method and task-doing; they ask nothing of us and give, give, give give . . . . man, they make me smile.

May the light, the bees and the opportunities not be lost to you,

Michael