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FICTION

Allen Drury

ADVISE AND CONSENT

"The most exciting, most dis-
criminating and most intimate
novel of Washington political
life yet to appear . . . Timely al-
most beyond belief."

—N. Y. Herald Tribune
Book Review. $5.75

George Tames

Thomas B. Costain

THE DARKNESS AND THE DAWN

Like *The Black Rose* this is an-
other great adventure historical,
laid in the fifth century, when
Attila the Hun cast his shadow
over a licentious, decaying Rome.
$3.95

Rasul, Ottawa

Daphne du Maurier

THE BREAKING POINT

A new collection of short stories
featuring the same wit, imagina-
tion, romance, and touch of hor-
ror that made *Kiss Me Again,*
*Stranger* a nationwide best seller.
$3.95

Dorothy Wilding

POETRY

Vladimir Nabokov

POEMS

The controversial novelist and
short-story writer reveals the
third side of his personality in
this collection of his complete
poetic works in English. $3.00

Delmore Schwartz

SUMMER KNOWLEDGE

New and Selected Poems: 1938-
1958, including the full contents
of *In Dreams Begin Respon-
sibilities, excerpts from two
other volumes, and previously
uncollected poems.
$4.95

Jane Lougee

Robert Graves

THE ANGER OF ACHILLES

A masterful new prose-and-po-
etry translation of Homer's Iliad
by the author of *I. Claudius* —
memorably illustrated by Ron-
ald Searle. To be published in
November.
$5.00

Henry Ries

NON-FICTION

Bertrand Russell

WISDOM OF THE WEST

From the pre-Socratics to Exis-
tentialism in text and 450 illus-
trations (250 in full color). Reg-
ular and De Luxe editions, $9.95
and $11.95 from November 5
to Christmas; $12.50 and $14.50
thereafter.

H.B.C.

Herman Wouk

THIS IS MY GOD

An outstanding novelist's mov-
ing and eloquent statement of
personal faith, interwoven with
an illuminating history of Juda-
ism, the religion he devoutly
practices.
$3.95

Edith Sherran

Arthur Bryant

TRIUMPH IN THE WEST

An intimate, outspoken chron-
icle of the events from Septem-
ber 1943 to V-E Day based on
the diaries of Field Marshal
Lord Alanbrooke, this sequel to
*The Turn of the Tide* will be
published in November. $6.95

Clayton Evans

William Howells

MANKIND IN THE MAKING

A splendid, eminently readable
history of evolution and its mar-
vels, based on the latest anthro-
pological discoveries and
theories. Lavishly illustrated. To
be published in November.
$4.95

Douglas Armedon

V. Sackville-West

DAUGHTER OF FRANCE

The Life of La Grande Made-
moiselle. "Has the grip of a
powerful novel . . . She has ele-
vated a footnote to history into
a drama rich with universal
values."—N. Y. Herald Tribune
Book Review. Illustrated. $4.95

Hodder &HALDANE

POETRY

VOLUME 94 NUMBER 2

MAY 1959

FIFTY CENTS

H. D. Regents of the Night

DELMORE SCHWARTZ Summer Knowledge

KENNETH KOCH Thank You

EDA LOU WALTON In Passage Tropical

JACK CRAWFORD, JR. JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN

MARY SOLES PHILIP BOOTH

ROBERT S. SWARD CONSTANCE URDANG

PAUL CARROLL HAROLD NORSE

JEAN GARRIGUE Dylan Thomas

DAVID LOUGÉE The Letters to Vernon Watkins

JAMES DICKEY Five Poets

ALAN NEAME London Chronicle

HUGH KENNER To Measure Is All We Know

Oxford

Books of Exceptional Interest

THE OXFORD COMPANION
TO FRENCH LITERATURE

Compiled and edited by SIR PAUL HARVEY and J. E. HESELTINE. A brand new *Oxford Companion* that contains 6,000 entries; articles on poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, historians, scientists, statesmen, philosophers; biographies; etc.; 900 pages, alphabetical listing, cross-referencing; 2 maps. $12.50

METAPHYSICAL LYRICS AND
POEMS OF THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

DONNE TO BUTLER

Selected and edited, with an Essay, by HERBERT J. C. GRIERSON. "A veritable 'golden treasury' of the choicest verse of the 'conceited' school from Donne, its leader, to Butler . . . made with fastidious taste and set out with scrupulous exactness in textual detail."—Year's Work in English Studies. Galaxy paperbound edition $1.75

THE JOURNALS AND PAPERS
OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Second Edition

Edited by HUMPHRY HOUSE, completed by GRAHAM STOREY. This new, enlarged edition contains all Hopkins's previously unpublished poems and fragments from his two early diaries; the journal that gives details of his decision to become a Jesuit; five undergraduate essays; a full collection of his drawings; all Hopkins's known settings to songs.

43 illustrations. $15.00

At all bookstores • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

POETRY

MAY 1959

<table><tr><td>71</td><td>H. D.</td><td>Regents of the Night</td></tr><tr><td>74</td><td>KENNETH KOCH</td><td>Thank You<br>You Were Wearing</td></tr><tr><td>78</td><td>MARY SOLES</td><td>Two Poems</td></tr><tr><td>82</td><td>JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN</td><td>Poems for My Cousin</td></tr><tr><td>85</td><td>ROBERT S. SWARD</td><td>Barbecue</td></tr><tr><td>89</td><td>EDA LOU WALTON</td><td>Clock and Three Candles<br>Epitaph<br>In Passage Tropical</td></tr><tr><td>92</td><td>PHILIP BOOTH</td><td>These Men</td></tr><tr><td>93</td><td>PAUL CARROLL</td><td>The Cigar Store Indian's Gift to the Puritans</td></tr><tr><td>94</td><td>CONSTANCE URDANG</td><td>Four Unromantic Portraits</td></tr><tr><td>98</td><td>HAROLD NORSE</td><td>Was It Florence or Venice</td></tr><tr><td>100</td><td>JACK CRAWFORD, JR.</td><td>The Wound of Innocence<br>Empty House<br>Goddess of the Doorbell<br>A Breast Humming</td></tr><tr><td>104</td><td>DELMORE SCHWARTZ</td><td>The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous<br>Swift<br>The River Was the Emblem of All Beauty; All<br>Summer Knowledge</td></tr></table>

COMMENT

<table><tr><td>111</td><td>JEAN GARRIGUE</td><td>"Dark Is a Way and Light Is a Place"</td></tr><tr><td>114</td><td>DAVID LOUGÉ</td><td>An Open Window</td></tr></table>

[CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE]

POETRY

H. D.

yet still this Trinity sends out its message
through the winter-dark, "arise, arise, re-animate,

O Spirit, this small ark, this little body,
this small separate self; of the world's mortals,

make but one immortal, let but one awake,
to set the dead pyre flaming,

that the Phoenix, Venus, Venus, Mercury
may fire the world with ecstasy,

with Love who forgets our faults,
with Love who redeems the lost,
with Love, Love, Love *unique*.

II

What of the other Regents of the night? lost?
no, Germain, hold me close, peach-blossom petals fall

outside a bamboo-shelter—is it four? or five? or earlier?
what Trinity shall we call, to spread the silken covers

of our bed? here, the rain drips
and snow, just turned to rain, upon the windows,

and the window-panes are clouded with this winter-rain
and snow;

this is our day—the night? shall we renounce

the later fruit, the peach and pomegranate,
cleft open, ripe to be taken, eaten?

72

your pride, your dignity, my own reticence
demands perfection; not here, where we meet

in friendly talk, "I heard a symphony, Cherubini,
new to me, yesterday when you left,

I think that he knew Liszt;
funny, you were quite right,

Purcell is much, much earlier than Mozart;
to-morrow, then?" he bows and on my hand

peach-blossom petals fall,
this is the day, the one kiss that we know.

73

POETRY

KENNETH KOCH

THANK YOU

Oh thank you for giving me the chance
Of being ship's doctor! I am sorry that I shall have to refuse—
But, you see, the most I know of medicine is orange flowers
Tilted in the evening light against a cashmere red
Inside which breasts invent the laws of light
And of night, where cashmere moors itself across the sea.
And thank you for giving me these quintuplets
To rear and make happy . . . My mind was on something else.

Thank you for giving me this battleship to wash,
But I have a rash on my hands and my eyes hurt,
And I know so little about cleaning a ship
That I should rather clean an island.
There one knows what one is about—sponge those palm trees,
sweep up the sand a little, polish those coconuts;
Then take a rest for a while and it's time to trim the grass as well
as separate it from each other where gummy substances have
made individual blades stick together, forming an ugly bunch;
And then take the dead bark off the trees, and perfume these
islands a bit with a song . . . That's easy—but a battleship!
Where does one begin and how does one do? to batten the
hatches? I would rather clean a million palm trees.

Now here comes an offer of a job for setting up a levee
In Mississippi. No thanks. Here it says *Rape or Worse*. I think they
must want me to publicize this book.
On the jacket it says "Published in Boothbay Harbor, Maine"—
what a funny place to publish a book!

74

KENNETH KOCH

I suppose it is some provincial publishing house
Whose provincial pages emit the odor of sails
And the freshness of the sea
Breeze . . . But publicity!

The only thing I could publicize well would be my tooth,
Which I could say came with my mouth and in a most engaging
manner
With my whole self, my body and including my mind,
Spirits, emotions, spiritual essences, emotional substances, poetry,
dreams, and lords
Of my life, everything, all embraceled with my tooth
In a way that makes one wish to open the windows and scream
"Hi!" to the heavens,
And "Oh, come and take me away before I die in a minute!"

It is possible that the dentist is smiling, that he dreams of extrac-
tion
Because he believes that the physical tooth and the spiritual tooth
are one.

Here is another letter, this one from a textbook advertiser;
He wants me to advertise a book on chopping down trees.
But how could I? I love trees! and I haven't the slightest sympa-
thy with chopping them down, even though I know
We need their products for wood-fires, some houses, and maple
syrup—
Still I like trees better
In their standing condition, when they sway at the beginning of
evening . . .

And thank you for the pile of driftwood.
Am I wanted at the sea?

75

POETRY

And thank you for the chance to run a small hotel
In an elephant stopover in Zambezi,
But I do not know how to take care of guests, certainly they
would all leave soon
After seeing blue lights out the windows and rust on their iron
beds—I'd rather own a bird-house in Jamaica:
Those people come in, the birds, they do not care how things are
kept up . . .
It's true that Zambezi proprietorship would be exciting, with
people getting off elephants and coming into my hotel,
But as tempting as it is I cannot agree.
And thank you for this offer of the post of referee
For the Danish wrestling championship—I simply do not feel
qualified . . .

But the fresh spring air has been swabbing my mental decks
Until, although prepared for fight, still I sleep on land.
Thank you for the ostriches. I have not yet had time to pluck
them,
But I am sure they will be delicious, adorning my plate at sunset,
My tremendous plate, and the plate
Of the offers to all my days. But I cannot fasten my exhilaration
to the sun.

And thank you for the evening of the night on which I fell off
my horse in the shadows. That was really useful.

76

KENNETH KOCH

YOU WERE WEARING

You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.
In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar
Allan Poe.
Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, "Do
most boys think that most girls are bad?"
I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your
hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.
"No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we
read *Snowbound* together
And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was
scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country,
shoes.

Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes
comb in her hair.
We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in
cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville
As well as with illustrations from his book *Moby Dick* and from
his novella, *Benito Cereno*.
Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a
drink, everyone?"
I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch
and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.
You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.
In the yard across the street was a snowman holding a garbage can
lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George
the Third.

77

POETRY

while worlds
roll fickle, and fickle a leader
wills!

You
and I grieve this side still
of all pollution

weaving
our frail and fervent feet
too close to the open grave.

Be still
and listen
to growls greedy as the lion roars,

whose groin
and
mine, climbed and grew weary.

I hear
waves whisper where many
an old and ill-met feeding claim
was laid!

And where at last
we
all shall rest, blessed
within thirst to reddest wine

lips
loosened by white
and bright wafers of bone's bread,

80

MARY SOLES

there I shall lay no claim
to wrists,
ankles and skull
of my torment.

Forgetting bloated belly's feeble cry,
and the pale
pink cheekbone, my spent
breasts should fill out, gold

as the summer rye—folded
further than flesh, will I mesh then
simple as the
new-born cry.

Lie
down and sleep, still
warm you are, and soft and sweet.

Lie down and sleep, my eyes
dry
driven back to skull,
will hold your own
long as my breath will keep.

81

POETRY

JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN

POEMS FOR MY COUSIN

I TOOK MY COUSIN TO PRETTYBOY DAM

I took my cousin to Prettyboy Dam.

A boxer was swimming for sticks, the ripples
Blew from the left, and beer cans glittered
Under the poison-ivy.

We talked of pelota; and of how the tendrils of vines
Curl opposite ways in the opposite hemispheres.

My cousin was dying. By this I mean

The rate of his disengagement was rapid.

There was a haze of heat, and August boys
Chunked rocks at a bottle that bobbed on the water.

The slow hours enclosed the flight of instants,
Melted the picnic-ice.

Everything he saw differently, and more clearly than I.
The joined dragon-flies, the solid foam of the fall;

The thin haste of the ant at my foot,

And me, as I looked at him.

We were close beside each other, speaking of
Pelota, chaining cigarettes when the matches were gone.

But we saw different things, since one could not say
“Wait . . .”

Nor the other “Come . . .”

82

JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN

ARRIVAL OF MY COUSIN

My cousin is arrived in
the green city of the dead.

It slopes, shapes itself
in hilly contours, and the summer light
lights all the white stones, crosses and angels of granite.

Thousands or tens of thousands
in the cool grass, under the flight
of birds, of shadows of birds; the shadow
of flight in the sunny marble,

the bird-notes, bird-calls, dew-clear;

The blue and white sky is bent over my cousin,
in the green city of the dead.

Traffic sweats and stalls on Oliver Street,
and Hargrove, Dolphin, Bethel Streets; the dirty bars
sweat, and the usual accidents in the accident-rooms
are glazed by July, as are the gutters and the junk-man's
horse, jerked up the tar-soft mountain of July.

My cousin, however, is in
the green city of the dead.

Not being of a primitive tribe
I speak in metaphor when I find my cousin,
cloud-free, granite-still, in
the green bird-rich city, bounded
by the sweating streets, and the houses, and rooms,
and the people in streets, houses, rooms
and their eyes.

By the body of Christ we ate, his absence
is evident:

But I speak of the token, the image

83

POETRY

I was given for identity;
that word of flesh, like a name, a sound,
is what I speak of.

Infinitely not of the alley, the gutter, the traffic,
the sweating problem that walks
the pavement, sits in the room,—
is the token, the word, the vanishing image of my cousin
under blue sky, white cloud, grass, bird-call, stone angel
in the green city of the dead.

84

ROBERT S. SWARD

ROBERT S. SWARD

BARBECUE

For W. D.

I

They were spraying 7-up and moth-juice
On the fire. The mosquitoes, lawn-flies
And moths dove, flashed and were painlessly
Consumed. There was applause

... we entered.

And while my wife was kissed, they clapped
Me on the back. They wanted to know
That I was there;—and then I kissed them

Down their throats, choked & knew that they were there.

And after I had kissed those who had
Kissed my wife, and after they kissed me
We sprayed one another, scratched and dove
After the moths. We flashed, painlessly,
And emerged to munch the ashes, coals
To sip moth-juice, 7-up and gin.

And (again) we clapped one another
Laughed, kissed, sipped, puffed & swallowed cigarettes.

II

When the Ginns arrived, they were pounded
On their backs. Our fists came out their mouths.
(We all took turns laughing hands that way,
And toasting with one another.)

85

POETRY

ROBERT S. SWARD

Poor
Wrist-throated Mrs. G.! She was mad.
Her breasts were ferocious olives. She
Wouldn't smile, or sip—and we all
Took turns mixing drinks through her (and Mr. G.).

III

The *cat*-girl would not believe in it
And crouched there, pained, purring with the pups;
(Their tails were remarkably alike
And neither pronounced upon events
With them.) From time to time they'd lick one
Another—or the cream-dip—but otherwise
Were still

... though one of the pups had tried
The fire, and the *cat*-girl—sleekly swallowed gin.

IV

Someone found Lil, the wife of no one,
Buried beside the spit. She wanted
A martini; we obliged—and then
Reburied her.

Fran nibbled at the
Charcoal in Bernie's fingernails.

They'd
Expelled her from Home Economics.

And Bernie dove in after the moths
Only to be buried
topped, beside the spit.

86

V

The sky was rainbow strips of chrome, clouds
And the sun, the great, archetypal
Ford:—pork-sauced—and on the suburban
Spit of heaven.

*And Lil's angel waved*
*Free, fulfilled and married, now, to chrome*
*... sipping gin-&-tonic.*

We all stared,
Climbed up upon our spit, and then dove
In after the moths.

— *The fire attained to Lil.*

Unfortunately, the rest of us
Did not. And we had to try to tell
(Again) whether or not we were there.
The fire was a Ford, without chrome, pure
As gin, as cream-dip—moths or spray, death
And we sang to it: its attaining
To heaven, to Lil, to space, ourselves
And the archetypal Ford.

The Ford honked, then

Backed off its spit, and began to set.
In the other distance, in the space
The consuming that is East, the night—
Beyond where the moths take form, beyond
What we flash for when we die

—we sense
The white-walled dawn . . . time & tomorrow's
Ford.

The *cat*-girl vomited—and there was Mars
The suburban star of barbecue.

87

POETRY

VI

The party had somehow failed. The cards!!
*And there was Rummy, large as Lil, four'd*
*The evening star*. It was time for gin
*And time for LIGHT!*

No one would admit
That he was there; we hid in front of
One another's wife. The women hid
Beside the flames—the way they flickered
Through their eyes.

I kept trying to put my tongue

Into their cards, into their eyes, ears
Throats, between their teeth; but their's were there
Between mine. I bit them. And they cried
With half their tongues

*munching diamonds & spades.*

And the bushes had begun the moon,
Ending 'gin,' martinis, and marriage.
SUDDENLY THE WOMEN SCREAMED. THE MOON
BURST THROUGH, REVEALING THEIR HUSBANDS,

THE PUP-GIRL

THEMSELVES. The bushes became the lawn;
The night, the earth; and the moths, the sun.

The men became their wives; and the wives
Became the men, for the most part *re*-*

Marrying themselves. *The men were asleep*
*Beside their wives, smiling, spitted, still*

*Illicit*.—Morning. My wife and I
Sipped gin; I was Bernie, and she the moths.

88

EDA LOU WALTON

EDA LOU WALTON

CLOCK AND THREE CANDLES

Assemble me then
Clock and three candles
To strike at lighting
To tick and tock decline;
Year after year wax petals cover
Birth and blighting
Till in black sockets
Blue flames pine.
If in cathedral
An altar hold them
Holy their belled
Down burning,
If in a bridal
Chimes toll them
Love until dead,
Candles and clock have said
All that is tidal.

Someone it seemed
In the night named symbols,
"Clock and three candles
Assemble me then"
So in a dream I brought them together
(Clock and three candles)
And woke at my scream.

89

POETRY

PHILIP BOOTH

THESE MEN

What is man, that mindful of him
in his last act, I let tears blind me?
Scene after scene, his voice
is his sword's, yet when chaste stars illumine
his justice, his choice
is finally to fall from the height his words
must reach. These men remind me.

Not that through their torn mask I name
them, walking on in crossed light, or pray
to a stage that time will revolve.
Too frail to be gods, men who need women
and silence, who love
to be loved, they risk their trial words
to redeem, not themselves, but the play.

Speaking, they speak cast out of time:
a prince who would break up the dumb-show,
a kingdom-dividing king, a son
at the crossroads; they question how common
it is to be man,
and measured for death by their words'
grave rise, sentence themselves to know.

92

PAUL CARROLL

PAUL CARROLL

THE CIGAR STORE INDIAN'S
GIFT TO THE PURITANS

A wife whose words are shy
and almost awkward as
the tracks of a hurt snowbuck.
A wife with a quiet eye
the shifting contours of a cloud.
With breasts of bees' bone.
A wife with a body the shell
of the egg of the turtle,
the cry of a wild dog.
A wife with arms and legs
the roots of crab grass.
A wife whose face is
the blue sun of a deep sleep.
With belly like a basket,
tobacco shag, tiny sweet potatoes
and pods of seed, inside.
A wife whose buttocks are
touch of the rain on rocks.
A wife who has the heart
of the devils of the moon.
A heart of fish fin, flashing.
A heart the sleep of the cats.
A wife who has a tree
growing in the mind.
Or a goshawk, circling, slowly.

93

POETRY

CONSTANCE URDANG

FOUR UNROMANTIC PORTRAITS

I

MADAME BLANCHARD: WOODCUT

*The hero can prove what he is only by dying.*
E. H.

Whatever spectacle the crowd came for
They were not disappointed when,
'Small, ugly, nervous,'
She ascended into Heaven in
A rain of gold. Antiphonal
To their polite applause, the ballast spilled
Glistening, earthward; Madame sailed
Serenely in her gondola
Slung from the great balloon.

And then
Up from that sea of faces welled
A murmur like the sea's, the gasp,
The soft release, of wonder at
Her fiery arabesques across the air
—Not understanding what they saw
Until too late: balloon and gondola
Alight, and angels all around
Exploding bright, disguised as Bengal flares—

A cynic wrote: she was a shrew,
Petulant, full of groundless fears,
Who sought the Empyrean to
Elude the landlord and the dun.

94

CONSTANCE URDANG

An unknown artist, who was probably
Not there, outlined her unavoidable,
Final, dramatic moment: like
A comet, Madame flashed above
The Paris roofs; then fell and broke her neck.

2

ARTHUR RIMBAUD: DRYPOINT

Discarding the exotic face, forked tongue,
And cloven hooves, Rimbaud put on
The apron of reality to play
Grocer, but unsuccessfully.

When innocently once upon a time
He'd planned imaginary crime,
Just so the literal police,
Taking his fictional for real,
Arrested him and put him in a cell.

3

EARL DENMAN: PHOTOGRAPH

*Who then can be saved?*
Matt.: 19:25

In an age dedicated to success,
Gentlemen, I present
Earl Denman, destined to spectacular
Failure.

Under a waning star
He drew his first breath of dissent.

95

POETRY

His photograph, clipped, British, and moustached
Gaunt with self-pity, eyes us unabashed,
Repeating, 'There is something pitiable
About our age.'

Once, and again,
He challenged Everest and lost,
A tiny, ineffectual
David, who can no longer still
The giant's boast.

He teaches by example how
To avoid becoming a hero. Never he,
Only his balaclava cap
Ever achieved the mountaintop;
Presented by him to his Sherpa guide,
It rode to triumph on the fellow's head.

4

BILLY THE KID: STEREOPTICON SLIDE

Here are two images, distinct
Down to the diamond stickpin, that will not
Merge: Billy, is this a joke
Like the one you played on Grant to win your bet?
Or a game of frontier patience, you, concealed
Within these pictures of yourself, the twin
Sides of your coin, in ambush like the time
You dropped Hindman and Brady in the road?

The lefthand likeness shows a bucktoothed runt,
Less than man-size, nevertheless the dude,
Strangely familiar; in the morning paper
They posed a gang of you in black windbreakers,

96

CONSTANCE URDANG

Sideburns, ducktail haircuts, come
From everywhere, driven like you, betrayed
Like you, by the force that drove them, small again
Like you, slouching near Beaver Smith's saloon,
Quinting into the sun.

But in
The picture on the right, the swagger and
Swashbuckle boldness you put on
With the carnation in the dark lapel,
Fit like your skin. 'Handsome, amiable,
Courageous,' knight-errant of youth,
You ride the ranges of romance
Stirrup to stirrup with your myth.

The double images persist.
No effort of the eye or brain
Wrenches into focus, superimposes
One on the other, so as to cancel out
The inconsistencies of sight and seen.
Somewhere in fact or legend, reality
Cranes furtively around the livery barn
Where Billy waited for the sheriff's men.

97

POETRY

JACK CRAWFORD, JR.

THE WOUND OF INNOCENCE

Is the child frightened? I will rush
Out into the dark with my bare fists.
Has anyone threatened my small daughter?
I will stare them into insignificance;
I will destroy them with my bare eyes;
I will whip them with my tongue
Dipping it in vitriol. This innocence
Has tentacles in my heart. Its pain
Is a double wound from which my blood
Drains to whiteness. By her side
I am a lion. "You idiot!" someone cries.
My nape goes up, subsides.
I know. I am a fool.
I cannot hold the darkness from her eyes.
I cannot breathe for her, or think for her.
I cannot tell her life is only honey,
All golden summer forever, with the white
Heavens riding!
Her mother nigh with kisses,
Her father some beardless god.
Tears lie in my stomach.
I go out and break whole limbs
Of apple blossoms from my orchard;
Leaving the trees
Moaning with their wounds.

100

JACK CRAWFORD, JR.

EMPTY HOUSE

The house is still, empty as a ghost.
My daughters just went out into the snow
New with a great softness falling
From soundless heavens, smoothing down the earth.
The fields are full; the yards, roads, as far
As eye can see; the house gapes emptily.
The voices of the girls just now
Filtered through floors and walls;
Bright-voiced talk full of colors,
Like a brilliant scarf around my throat
Shining and soft with sound.
The snow falls among their smiling lips,
Clinging to hoods and shoulders, and slipping.
Their eyes glitter in the softness, the flakes
Drifting like sleep, their gestures
Maryelous through the silence.
The house is still and I know,
Resonantly, how silence murders sound,
Throttling it with a noose of snow
Where my brilliant daughters play,
Leaving in the colors of their wake
A need for them as open as this door.

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POETRY

GODDESS OF THE DOORBELL

The bells of the door ring;
An instant longer shall I labor here
In these serenities.
The finger of a little girl is pressing
The doorbell, asking if I am here
In its electric voice, and hers.
It is my daughter standing in the snow.
I sit here hammering the keys of love.
A moment longer, O bright-lipped child,
Standing in the snows of time.
The idea surges with my heart,
Brilliant with colors, like the sparks
Of bursting suns, spilling rainbows.
The snow is haunted with her; the bell is still.
The silence empties me; all is dream;
Insubstantial; a drift of flakes;
The roof receives them, lifting them
Off my head; the wall holds up the roof.
I am held up by the child I love,
As surely as this roof, and by her eyes
And lips I live. A moment, and I rush
Bolt-long, heart-headed, and throw
Open the belling door to the snow.
My heart is standing there, not three;
Blonde, her lips red-dyed, her eyes
Blue as light where the flakes fall.
The goddess smiles at me, and in her smile
Enters, and light is in my hall.

102

JACK CRAWFORD, JR.

A BREAST HUMMING

I hear far off a sound.
It is a breast humming. It moves
Through flowers to its waist.
It is asleep in time's flood.
Hummingbirds rub on velvet dyes.
Color is an ocean of sound.
A voice fades in density.
Flowers bend and winds come
With slow-drawn draughts. Summers turn.
Red suns glaze their discs and burn.
I hear far off a sound
Like moving grain; like smoke
Its whisper; I have lain
With the humming breast;
Been comforted, been dandled by knees,
Earth's bounding thighs.
A voice like the whisper of pearls
Crosses the worlds.
The turfy sound of pulsing hooves
Muffles at the pillowed eaves.
Hugged by the humming sun I turn,
Tugged by the blood of the moon.
Horses walk by the rose of the sea,
Proud, shadowless. They dream,
Too far for sound.
Liquid as silk, they gaze
Toward dark where no suns blaze,
Elegant, enchanted, black,
Their eyes like elegies.

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POETRY

DELMORE SCHWARTZ

THE MOUNTING SUMMER,
BRILLIANT AND OMINOUS

A yellow-headed, gold-hammered, sunflower-lanterned
Summer afternoon: after the sun soared and soared
All morning to the marble shining heights of marvellous blue,
Like lions insurgent, bursting out of a great zoo,
As if all vividness poured down, poured out, poured
Over, bursting and breaking in all the altitudes of blaze,
As when the whole ocean rises and rises, in irresistible motion,
shaking;
The roar of the heart in a shell or the roar of the sea beyond the
concessions of possession and the secessions of time's fearful
procession, precious even in its continuous perishing.

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DELMORE SCHWARTZ

SWIFT

From THE KINGDOM OF POETRY

What shall Presto do for pretty prattle
To entertain his dears? Sunday: lightning fifty times!
This week to Flanders goes the Duke of Ormond!
Small hope of him, although he loves me well!

All of my hopes now possible,
None certain. As, my lampoon
Talked up all over, cried up to the sky
—You are an impudent slut to be so positive
Though all has gone just as you said it would!
Sirrah! write constantly! don't I write every day
And sometimes twice? Stella writes like an em-
peror.

Sirrah, I am surprised forever—by myself!
Or by the others—dee dee: an angel child
Stupid in me, stupid or innocent
Astonished by the gush of vanity
The stone and eyes of pride—yet equally
By the least straw or glitter of nobility!

—Faith, Madame Dingley, what think you of the
world to come?
Patience! Patience is a gay thing—O saucy rogues,
Patience is better than luck: be gay till I return.

Mr. Harley speaks every kind thing to me.
Truly, I do believe, would serve me if I stayed
—Called at the coffee house, stayed there a while,
Coldly conversed with Mr. Addison:

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POETRY

All our friendship and clearness now are off
Is it not odd? I think he has used me ill:
I have as little pleasure as anyone
In all the world, although I am
In full favor with the entire ministry.
Nothing gives Presto any dream of happiness
But letters now and then from his deelest ones.

The pride of power, the pride and pleasure of place
and power are Towers
And trivial toys which lure me grievously
Ravaging furiously in a lunation's infuriation...
Bursting the Rome in my head, my empire!
Gulliver? gullible! The Caesars in my heart
Tell me how all infamy is possible,
And certain treacheries extremely probable!

I must take leave of deelest MD now. Prithee,
Be merry, patient girls and love your Presto.
I have read all the trash and I am weary:
Deelest lives, there is peace and quiet with thee
And thee alone. None have the leisure here for little
things.
Farewell again, dear rogues; I am never happy
But when I think of thee MD. Sirrah,
I have had enough of courts and ministries.
I wish I were once more at Laracor:
Faith, do you know each syllable I write
I hold my lips exact for all the world
As if I talked the little language with MD.

Yesterday died the Duke of Ormond's daughter:
Poor dear, she was with child. She was

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DELMORE SCHWARTZ

My favourite pet—save thee—I hardly knew
A being more valuable, more beautiful,
Of more nobility. I fear the certainty
That she was thrown away quite carelessly,
And merely lacked care. 'Tis clear, at any rate,
That she was very healthy naturally.

—Her Lord's a puppy, I'll no more of him,
Now that he's lost his only valuable . . .
—I hate life when I see it thus exposed
To accidents like these, so many thousands
Burthening the earth with their stupidity,
While such as she must die—abruptly—pointlessly—

Somebody is coming wants a little place.
My heart is set upon the cherry trees
By the river side. My saucy sluts
Farewell my deelest Nite poo dee MD. . . .

Y'see a Sea that's ten miles wide, a town
On t'other side, ships sailing in the Sea
Discharging great Canons at MDs and mee,
I see a great Sky, Moon and Stars, and ALL:
I am a Fool.

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POETRY

P

THE RIVER WAS THE EMBLEM
OF ALL BEAUTY; ALL

From THE STUDIES OF NARCISSUS

The river swanly in its swanhood flowed,
Slowly and willing, softer than deer asleep
Until there rose, as out of caves concealed
The braiding of the shuffling, swirling, and whirling
Of the rounding drums of the rippling waves:
And the silk flash of the soaring sun
Exalted itself, and in self-celebration blazed,
Over and under the swag and swagger of the great white summer clouds, slowly blooming, sailing serenely:
Over and under the flowering, flourishing wonder
Of those colossal blossoms, at the great blue's curving diamond
height. (Balow & Bozze)

My ever-new, forever born and deathless beauty rode,
Ripened, rippled, opened to all the successions and processions
Of the light's might and the light's dances, swaying
As every glittering radiance of petal of sparkle chanted:
Behold, at the heart of patience, the secrets of the stars,
The secret of summer and the secret of seed and star.
Wait and grow, wait and wane: this is the lore
And the lore of actuality: what you are now
Is but the beginning, bud, and pod or seed of what you may become or will surely be;
What you are now is but the green of the fruit,
Is but the caterpillar of the butterfly. And look, look! How faces
are often dogs
Running ahead, and looking back, towards you
Sniffing at the future, excited by the unknown....

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DELMORE SCHWARTZ

SUMMER KNOWLEDGE

Summer knowledge is not the winter's truth,
It is not May knowledge, little and leafing and growing green,
It is not the knowing and the knowledge of the gold fall and the
ripened, darkening vineyard,

Nor the black tormented, drenched and rainy knowledge of
birth, April, beginning and travail.

—The knowledge of the womb's convulsions and the coiled
cord's ravelled artery, severed, split, as its root forces its way
up from the dark loam—

—The agony of the first knowledge of pain is worse than death
or worse than the thought of death:

No poppy, no preparation, no initiation, no illusion, only the in-
cision of the black hurt beginning, distant from all knowledge
and all conclusion, all alleviation, all conception of termina-
tion, —

So that pain unending is the first of all sensations).

But, look, summer is other, summer knowledge is green knowl-
edge, country knowing, the knowledge of growing and

The root's recognition of the fullness and the fatness and the
roundness of ripeness:

It is bird knowledge, it is the knowing which the birds possess.

When the sap ascends to the leaf, to the flowering and to the
ripening of the fruit

Which the root never sees and which the root believes in the
dark ark and ignorance of winter's knowledge and winter's
emptiness.

The knowledge of the fruit is not the knowledge possessed by the
root in its indomitable darkness of ambition, sucking the rain.

It is the condition of belief beyond conception or experience, or
the possibility of visibility, the gratification of sensation, the
liberation of fulfillment.

Summer knowledge is not picture knowledge, articulate knowl-
edge, the knowledge of lore, or the knowledge of after or be-
fore.

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POETRY

It is not the view from the windows, or from the roof and bal-
cony and box, from the distance and the absence of beholding
beyond participation.

It is not the knowledge of the mountain or the springs flowing
down from the mountain to the fountain and the orchard,

Nor is it the still knowledge framed in gold, fixed in pigment,
measured and treasured in the marvellous birds of words and
the studied sentences of ultimate sentiments, and intimate, ac-
curate, understood intentions.

Summer knowledge is cat knowledge, deer knowledge, the
knowledge of the full-grown greenest foliage, the tree in white
blossom, the fruit of the tree in the roundness of radiance
reached and all richness.

It is the phoenix knowledge of the vine and the wine, the knowl-
edge of the last height and fullness of summer and summer's
ending

When the grape swells, when the apple reddens, when the tree is
heavy and ready, and the fruit is ready to fall:

It is the knowledge of the reddening apple when it moves to the
fullness of the time of falling to rottenness and death.

For summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as birth and
rebirth,

Of death as the soil of all abounding, flowering, and growing to
the fruit's fulfillment:

Summer knowledge is the knowledge of the truth of love and
the truth of growing: it is thus

The knowledge before and after knowledge:

For, finally, summer knowledge is not knowledge at all: it is sec-
ond nature,

First nature skilled and fulfilled, a new birth and a new death for
the new birth and the new morning, soaring and rising out of
the flames of turning October,

And blazing in the falling fires of burning November and all

The crimson, the immanence, the vividness of the red and the
bronze and the brown of the long descending brilliance of fall.

110

JEAN GARRIGUE

COMMENT

“DARK IS A WAY AND LIGHT IS A PLACE”

*The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas.* (Augmented Edition.) New Directions. $3.75.

The work is in and the scandalous chitchat is out but we who are the coevals of Dylan Thomas cannot be his posterity and any such appraisal as that eminent body is to make will not be ours. For those of us introduced to his work by that group of poems in *Poetry* in 1938, who can forget with what force it broke over our reeling heads? As with all good things, nothing like it had been seen, known, or felt before. "Make it new," Pound had said, and this was new, new and possessed, whirling like a dervish in time and space outside time—the time, that is, of the times—that England where nobody was well, that Europe of the tall-hatted poisoners of springs. Obsessed and possessed, working in a complicated rapture of language whose stormy play with contraries and opposites made for a texture and tension sensational and immediate on the surface and ambiguous at the center so that despite the great heat one labored for the light—this *sui generis* poetry presaged, it was soon being said, a return to the individual, a new romanticism, in short, all that which the poetry of the early thirties with its brilliant investigations of the diseased body politic had moved away from. But never was poetry less romantic in the usual sense of the word.

Whereas the romantic poet subscribed to a religion and a heroic re-
ligion of the self in all its phases, forms, as culture bearer, as sensitive me-
dium, as interpreter of the many modes of feeling and being, as grand
brooding figure summing up the many shapes of men, Thomas broke
with all that, especially in his first poems, turning to the anatomy not of
the self but of its animal other, the body, an animal without soul, nor the
possibilities of it entertained save in some ghosted mythic "mothers-
eyed" racial-recapitulation seed-of-Adam sense. As D. H. Lawrence said
in one of his letters that he was less interested in his characters as members
of a class and culture, of given occupations and specific heritages than as
psychological constellations, knots of force, hate, love, and chemic im-

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POETRY

pulsions, so Thomas, not writing love poems but sex poems, to coin a
phrase, discarded all traditional attitudes, including those of the personal.
Lover and beloved are not selves but exchanging forces on a dark field.
As parts of this geography of the under-skin tissue and muscle world
they are stripped down to their first meaning of meeting. No more than
other parts of the organic world, from the "soft snow's blood" to "wood-
en insect" (as the hair of the head is "but roots of nettles and feather" so
the earth, that skull, "is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair"),
they are also no more than this phylogeny of the endless ghosts in the
long spiraling progression back to the first one and beginner of it all.
When Death is not the metaphysical backdrop for this burrowing, flail-
ing, circular scene, Birth is, that first cry of Death. Against this fantasia
of the interior universe of Cadaver and the Worm are set those gargoyled
Powers: "scythe-eyed" Time, intricately related to Father Death, the
Animal as Sex, and, towering over all, the personae of the Bible—Jesus
without his cross and God without his beard, wrath, and Bible. As other
poets wrote of gods, he wrote of God, God's Mary in her grief, and Jack
Christ. Treated very freely in the beginning, almost as mere parts of an
imaginative order, it is only later that they become symbols and signs for
the precarious life of the spirit in a world not found but lost.

One has the feeling that, wild on his own chimeras, Thomas just kept
at bay the dreadful gorgons, the frightful adversaries of spirit, reason,
and flesh. "What's never known is best." And this by energy combating
despair. In any case, his early work, which has been described as baroque,
with its proliferation of metaphor from metaphor, partakes always of
whirling unrest, wild struggle of material against form in a tension so
coiled that motifs seem ever about to break away from the center, to
fly out into the chaos of space. That they do not testifies to the organizing
powers of concept, wonderfully beleaguered but unifying. All his snails,
fish, birds, quayside rails, endowed with dramatizing vitality, go at break-
neck speed round the mysterious eye and center of the poem. He writes
in a rage of tensions of man "with the maggot on his track", not man
wound on the reel of history nor caught in the social blight. He writes of
the dynamic unrest of things, the unrest of nature's fecundity, he writes
with the unrest of the spirit that would reveal the hidden analogies, the
secret and hitherto unrevealed connections between the body and the
green organic round of existence, between "the bough of bone", and

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JEAN GARRIGUE

"the secret oils that drive the grass". He was haunted by genesis and he
delved for its histories, in quest ever for the fresh wild unclassifiable sig-
nificance.

In his later poems he foregoes his more gordian complexities; another
kind of equilibrium has been found. The less accessible, more arbitrary,
more interior world where the conceit, the paradox, the pun, the double
play on words, the clashings and forcings waged their action has been ex-
changed for a more open, exterior world. He abandons some of his
masked impersonality, he is less private and more direct. The various
poems on birth, "the bunched monkey coming" of the child, find their
culmination in *Vision and Prayer* where before the dazzling meanings of
birth the soul must turn to the dark before it can rise from its self-sought
damnation to light. The line of an earlier poem "And dust be your
saviour" finds its echo and amplification in the line from *Poem on His
Birthday*: "And my shining men no more alone / As I sail out to die". Is
not this line a movement to and from the line in *Fern Hill*: "And I sang in
my chains like the sea"? For if one sings in one's chains one has spiritual-
ized circumstance and become free in one's prison. As in certain poems—
I am thinking especially of *Ceremony After a Fire Raid* and *A Refusal to
Mourn*—feeling is caught up in so formal a devotion that the language
seems to become the language of rite and liturgy, and the poems cere-
monial structures, invocations to the tragedy of birth and existence. The
power of absolute poetry is that it always sounds like absolute truth.

Thomas has been called a poet of faith and whatever that may pre-
cisely mean it remains that he put man back on one of his grandest stages,
in the theatre of heaven and damnation, that he saw him as well in his
most universal aspects, *not* as dense commuter, tool, and cypher. It also
remains that in our urban age of relativity, pessimism and scepticism he
wrote of the exuberant powers of the natural world and its capacities to
nourish and sustain, and the powers of the human spirit to withstand, in
moments at least, its natural adversaries—of the god-like in man by which
he may leap the wall of days, mazes, death, to find transcendence in the
vision that, despite time, is timeless. One may call Thomas's faith of praise
for essential being his energy before the "tossed blood" of despair that
knows "the terrible world my brother".

If when we think of his poems we think of water, that dominant sym-
bol, from the "pacing, famous sea" to the "heron-priested shore"—ut-

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POETRY

tered, all, with a surge of sound and the authority of beauty -impure,
pure, mixed, complex beauty—we think at the same time of that enemy
of water, fire. The crammed line, dense and at strife, “wants to” explode.
If it doesn’t at the end of the line it does at the end of the poem. The mo-
ment that is the poem flares, burns; there is the sense of ascension from the
particularities into the Mysteries.

The book is a voice of marked consistency and identity. A few domi-
nant themes, present from first to last; the words in single poems all
working to become one word, such is the drive for unity and compres-
sion; because the range of meanings is long, cross-cutting, far-flung,
 combatting, the sense of great pull, from circumference to center. To
compare this voice to a nightingale’s will not do. It is too original, too
complicated. One wants a *rara avis* for comparison, of extraordinary
cross-breeding, many-tongued and heaven-diving. But Bird, yes, des-
canting on its themes as if they had been learned before the Flood.

In a cold dry age Dylan Thomas's poetry spoke and speaks for the
holy unholy waters of blessed rage and exultance. This heir to Rimbaud,
Blake, Hopkins, the Bible, with his "cinder-nesting columns", his "priest,
water", that bring to mind the "temple-haunting martlets" of Shake-
speare and "the moving waters at their priestlike task" of Keats, has
created the new language of a vision. It is enough to alter the subtle cur-
rents of that stream that comes from we know not where, far before, no
doubt, the Pierian springs were made known by the Muses.

JEAN GARRIGUE

AN OPEN WINDOW

*Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins, edited, with an introduction, by Vernon Watkins. New Directions. $3.00.*

These letters of Dylan Thomas to his friend and fellow-poet Vernon
Watkins are most welcome indeed. They not only brightly portray the
poet's own voice, its always present humor and affectionate tone, but
afford, as Mr. Watkins points out, a close and telling commentary on the

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DAVID LOUGÉ

poetry itself. We are left with an image of the man any number of remi-
niscences would fail to convey, —a man who, to use a phrase Mark Van
Doren recently applied to Hawthorne, led “the life of wit, of civility,” of
charm, and the life of terror”.

It is this frequent disparity between the man and his work (present in
any artist but here strikingly prominent) and the ensuing paradox within
the work itself that are of particular interest. In discussing one of the lines
in an early version of his poem, *Unluckily for a Death*, Dylan Thomas
writes: “The jingle of ‘abide with our pride’ I’m retaining; I wanted the
idea of an almost jolly jingle there, a certain carelessness to lead up to the
flat, hard, ugly last line of truth, a suggestion of ‘Well, that’s over, O
atta boy we live with our joy’; a purposeful intolerance—no, I meant an
intolerance on purpose—of the arguments I had been setting against my
own instinctive delight in the muddled world.” This is not simply the
matter of a man disassociating himself from his own creative nature, as
was the case, for example, with Housman and Lewis Carroll. We have
here a poet who from early age was intensely preoccupied with death
and decay and who remained at the same time the most contagiously
humorous and light-hearted of human beings, an individual almost en-
tirely devoid of morbidity. And this two-edged quality of mind extended
to the work as well.

In a majority of the poems that comprise Dylan Thomas's first three
published volumes, one becomes increasingly aware that, while the poet
has sifted each word and found it right, the man behind those words is
curiously absent. Part of the reason for this can be ascribed to the poet's
intricately formal approach to his art, and the use of a singular and reso-
nant vocabulary dazzlingly remote from colloquial speech. Another fac-
tor to be kept in mind is that the dominant theme of these poems (the
ubiquity of death, its presence at birth or at the moment of inception it-
self—the two often working together as one metaphor) calls inherently
for a tone both immediate and abstract. What remains remarkable, how-
ever, is that a boy of nineteen should have been so intimately attuned to
the peculiar and impersonal music of a primordial world. It is an objec-
tivity which makes for some of the most dramatic and arresting poetry
in the language.

It was not long before Dylan Thomas became aware that certain in-
evitably oblique qualities of the early work, and the fluid, infectious style

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which gave it shape, might prove a hindrance to further development. In his first letter to Watkins, shortly before *Twenty-five Poems* was to appear, the poet writes: "I'm half way through another story, and have more or less finished a poem which I want to send you when I'm better pleased with it. But here again I'm not free; perhaps, as you said once, I should stop writing altogether for some time; now I'm almost afraid of all the once necessary artifices and obscurities, and can't, for the life or the death of me, get any real liberation, and diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words; I seem, more than ever, to be tightly packing away everything I have and know into a mad-doctor's bag, and then locking it up: all you can see is the bag, all you have to trust is that the invisible and intangible things packed away are—if they could only be seen and touched—worth quite a lot. ... You might, and would, I know if you could, help me by talking to me. I don't fear—we talked about it, do you remember—any sudden cessation or drying up, any coming to the end, any (sentimentally speaking) putting out of the fires; what I do fear is an ingrowing, the impulse growing like a toenail into the artifice." The passage carries a deep urgency, and while the fears may have been exaggerated, it keenly reveals the writer's honest and acute critical sense. There was, at any rate, little need to worry: it soon became apparent that a new impulse was to widen the artifice. The artist who could not repress his "instinctive delight in the muddled world" was to unite the seemingly disparate ends of his personality in the sharply funny, quick-eyed prose of *Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Adventures in the Skin Trade*, the beautiful poems of childhood reminiscence, the long narrative pieces such as *The Winter's Tale* and *In Country Sleep*, and the passionate high spirits of the play *Under Milk Wood*.

Dylan Thomas was fortunate in having had Watkins for a friend from so early a point in his life and career. The two poets were close and yet different enough in their basic attitudes so as to always remain helpful and stimulating to one another. But apart from their literary significance, these letters are a joy to read for their sheer expression of buoyant friendship. When New Directions was about to publish *The Selected Writings*, the editor wrote and asked the poet if he would have a friend write a brief personal introduction to the volume. Dylan Thomas wrote Watkins and asked if he would do it, adding: "We know each other by doing so many things together, from croquet to bathing (me for the first time)

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DAVID LOUGÉE • JAMES DICKEY

in the icy moon, poetry and very high teas, getting drunk, reading, reading, reading, sea staring, Swansea, Gower, Laugharne, London. ... I've written thousands of letters to you; if you've kept some you could use what you liked to help build up this 'human portrait' of this fat pleader. ..." And the letters most certainly do create a human portrait: touching, and taken at complete range. We owe to Mr. Watkins, and his publisher, a debt of gratitude for restoring to us the dedicated, lively accents of that long-missed voice.

DAVID LOUGÉE

FIVE POETS

*The Sum*, by Alan Stephens. Alan Swallow. $2.00.

*A Local Habitation*, by Ellen Kay. Alan Swallow. $2.00.

*A Book of Kinds*, by Margaret Tongue. The Stone Wall Press. $3.75.

*Passage After Midnight*, by William Pillin. Inferno Press Editions. $1.00.

*The Death of Venus*, by Harold Witt. The Golden Quill Press. $2.50.

T. S. Eliot notwithstanding, the most valid test of a young poet is whether or not he handles the language with a sense of discovery and excitement, and what might be called imaginative sincerity. What we wish most of all in first poems is the feeling of the poet's "going for broke" to get down something that is essential to him because of what he is. This is not the whole story, of course; the final difference between good and bad poetry, as it gets written, is probably made by a kind of sixth sense that tells the poet when and to what extent (though never how) his poems are making a right connection for him with the world as he knows it. All this is a mystery, of course: one of the most profound. When dealing with five poets as various as these, and (save for Mr. Pillin) as new, one is quite willing to concede everything to the mystery, to throw out the window all the delicately-adjusted apparatus of criticism "from Plato to Kenneth Burke", and to fall back on the criterion which Alexander Calder says he uses to evaluate his mobiles: "If I don't like it, it's no good. That's my only standard." As a starting point, one can hardly do better.

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