Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke

arising from the jungle, the Chosen sacrificed for history, and finally, since such rigorous pursuit will usually call forth in some form its own negation, we come to poems on the “Ice Heart,” the “vise of glaciers closing,” and her apostrophe:

      Draw near, O near, to the ice-heart! abase

      This blood before the white contagious death

      Till it congeal in harmony.

      There is no better proof of her deep attachment to her symbolism than the lovely sonnet “Is not this April of our brief desire” (where she Platonically interprets spring as the frail manifestation of some vaster awakening), or in her devout saluting of the dawn. But the full reward of her earnestness is to be seen in “Three Men Die,” a tribute which one can justly call exalted, to the secular martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, themselves pictured in light, their nerves burnt in the raw electric fire. Many a poet will be found to have made devotional services of his own, semi-private compensations for the lacunae or irrelevance in the symbols of institutional religion. But no one could be more definitely focused upon such effort than Lola Ridge in her recent volume.

      If I were required to characterize Mark Van Doren’s A Winter Diary and Other Poems in but one word, I should use the word “humble.” I do not mean that this poet makes a thriving business of humbleness (as the Frenchman Francis Jammes has done quite effectively). I refer to the fact that, when gripped by emotions, the author of these candid poems makes his reports, not with Byronic assertiveness, not with the air of one who would suggest that generous portions are his birthright, but apologetically—with timidity, regret, sorrow, and (at times of encouragement) gratitude. As a consequence, though his verse is lacking in brilliance, it does possess a subdued kind of poignancy. The long opening poem, a modernized extension of Whittier’s “Snowbound” (plus something of the moralistic schedule we get in Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”), the record of a city family’s sojourn in the country from fall to spring, will not satisfy those who demand that the line of poetry be packed—yet in its unassuming way it suggests the appropriate seasonal moods with penetration, and sets the memory to vibrating. Though mainly a record of mild delights, the poem made me quite melancholy, having as it does so many lines that seemed to me wholly gray (“Slap, slap, the sound of car chains going by”). There is also a sonnet sequence, a troubled account of love, the quality of the whole well pointed in these opening lines:

      I said: It will not blow this way again;

      The branches of my life too soon are old;

      The wind is kind to early-withered men

      Lest they remember and confess the cold.

      I said, and scarcely knew that it was I,

      Hanging my leaves there in the springless year.

      I said; and did not listen to a high,

      Loud sound of March that filled the woods with fear.

      Then it was all around me, till at last

      Love like a hurricane of hate was blowing

      Bruising me everywhere. Yet I was fast,

      And stood among the ruins of his going.

      Only the after stillness came and showed

      These blossoms on me everywhere, like blood.

      And perhaps not unrelated in essence, we have another long poem, “The Eyes,” suggesting an obsession of guilt prior to offense. The many short lyrics reinforce the note of sad decline that seems to motivate the poet’s output, one of the best formed being “This Amber Sunstream,” which ends

      No living man in any western room

      But sits at amber sunset round a tomb.

      James Agee’s Permit Me Voyage, which bears the endorsement of a foreword by Archibald MacLeish, I find somewhat difficult to characterize. One must respect it for its firm workmanship throughout, but at the same time one must feel that the poet is still somewhat ambiguous as regards the coordinates he lives by (no great disgrace, as he is still in his twenties). His “Epithalamium” is an extremely able record of the marriage night, with tactful interspersing of attendant meditations. And a symbolic narrative, “Ann Garner,” gives an impressive sense of rigor by picturing the stone-like kernel of silence that fell upon a woman whose child was still-born. “Life was in death,” he writes, as he symbolizes purgatorial moods, symbolic curses. The book also contains a long “Dedication” in prose that in Amy Lowell’s day would doubtless have been called “polyphonic.” A rhetoric of pity and anger, it reveals the great complexity of the issues to which the author is alive, is succinct, and shows considerable canniness of appraisal.

      Another volume in the “promising” category is David Greenhood’s Poems, et cetera. Like most poets of the Southwest, he is much given to visual imagery, to the evocation of vague moods by sharp perceptions. In “The Life of a Hunter,” a succession of prose paragraphs, the analogy between girl and deer is drawn out deftly, and with freshness. And one is shaken by the ominous speed of his “Aphorism”:

      Westward of the road the white cloud rose,

      Eastward hove the vulture,

      Earthward bowed the high-hung Jew

      Introducing culture.

      Much of his verse was obviously written at a time when his energies were not yet fully engaged or directed. They have the melancholy of potentialities unemployed, with the result that poetry has for him too many of the associations that go with incompletion. Hence the harsh decision of his envoy:

      Singers with sacred nerves,

      Mourners for the fallen leaf,

      We are writing tonight too many poems

      Awake with watchman and thief.

      Poets should always be ready to vow such treachery—but as they mature, they should find ever maturer reasons for failing to abide by their vow. In Greenhood’s case, I should imagine that his aphoristic gift, coupled with the adolescent association that poetry has for him, will most likely lead him into a period of analytic prose.

      I must end somewhat “unscientifically” by the mere mention of three other books, which are treated summarily not because they are unimportant (I consider all three of importance) but because I have written about them for publication elsewhere, and I should not feel justified in repeating myself here. I refer to Horace Gregory’s Chorus for Survival (which I am reviewing for Poetry) and e. e. cummings’ No Thanks and Kenneth Fearing’s Poems (which I am reviewing for The New Republic). Though sharper in his circumstantial references to the details of his times than Lola Ridge, Gregory resembles her in his turn for metaphysical unification—and I prefer the greater proportion of the critical which Gregory mixes with his sustained musicality. He is wholly at home in the current mode of seeing people statistically, noting about the individual his traits as member of a group. The attitude may show in the depiction of long historic movements—or we may find it in tribal migrations so brief as one evening’s traffic jam, as in the poem beginning

      Under the stone I saw them flow,

      express Times Square at five o’clock

      eyes set in darkness, trampling down

      all under, limbs and bodies driven

      in crowds, crowds over crowds, the street

      exit in starlight and dark air

      to empty rooms, to empty arms,

      wall paper gardens flowering there,

      error and loss upon the walls.

      One will find little current verse of greater scope and pliancy than that of Chorus for Survival.

      Cummings seems to have got himself into a surprising tangle which keeps him fluctuating between the cryptic and the moony, the comic and the mystically ecstatic—and he frequently grows vindictive in ways that show more fancy and invention than maturity. His satiric gift is crippled by