In Stanley Spencer’s great painting Resurrection, Cookham (1924–27), now in the Tate Gallery, the dead arise from their village graves just as we knew them in life; they may be naked or cloaked in spotless cerements, they may be unsteady yet on their uncertain feet, the lids of their tombs laid gently aside like the coverlets of awakened sleepers, but they are all familiar, with their own irreplaceable names and unmistakable faces. They are intact but not transfigured; they are as they were when we brushed against them in the lane or bought a loaf of bread from them in the shop. This strange and eerily jubilant canvas inspired one of Guy Davenport’s most accomplished poems, now included in The Guy Davenport Reader. And no wonder: In its playful solemnity, its unexpected humor, and above all perhaps in its sense of startled simultaneity—the dead are dead yet quickened into life—it could stand as a vivid epitome of Davenport’s own quite idiosyncratic art.
In the poem, “The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard,” Davenport takes Spencer’s painting as a launching pad for a grand resuscitation, not of his neighbors in Lexington, Kentucky, where he spent his working life, but of his own most familiar dead, those mighty shades who constantly refreshed and, yes, quickened his prose. John Ruskin, “frail” Thomas Peacock, Henry Purcell, and Henry Vaughn, among others, rise up and then,
In spiral sheen from eyes to toes
Thin Christina Rossetti rose,
Botticellian and long her
