The title poem of Dana Gioia’s Daily Horoscope is a six-page elegy dedicated to the memory of Robert Fitzgerald, the distinguished poet and translator who was Gioia’s teacher at Harvard. In the beginning of the poem, Fitzgerald is presented to us entirely stripped of his literary identity. Addressing Fitzgerald throughout the sequence as “you,” Gioia places his subject amidst the “unimportant” things in life, things “not worth counting, not worth singling out”:
Today will be like any other day.
You will wake to the familiar sounds
of the same hour in the same room,
sounds which no alarm is needed to announce.
Gioia then proceeds to restore Fitzgerald’s uniqueness. He gives us a glimpse of his mentor’s ability to discover, in the mundane world around him, the possibility of transcendence. (Gioia sees this as a deeply individualistic power; as he says in the first line of another poem, “Everyone has an entrance of his own” into this transcendent realm.) In the fifth section of the poem, entitled “The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves . . . ,” Gioia urges Fitzgerald to
Look for the smaller signs instead, the fine
disturbances of ordered things when suddenly
the rhythms of your expectation break
and in a moment’s pause another world
reveals itself behind the ordinary.
In Gioia’s view, finding “another world . . . behind the ordinary” is no small thing. Everyday reality exerts so great a pressure on us that at times it
