Henry would let him know what he could do
about it. With hi:l left foot pressed on the clutch
pedal, he put his car into low gear. "I'll tell Henry
I couldn't hold out any longer," he thought as he
started twisting the steering wheel hard to the left.
"I'll tell him it was Sacco and Vanzetti did it to
me." He lifted his left foot easily and slowly from
the clutch pedal; the car started and swung around
in the direction of Boston. Edward Peyton shifted
gears into second and then high. As the car gather-
ed momentum, he realized that he had forgotten
to take a last look over his shoulder at the sad little
ketch.
Two Poems
The Signal from the House
I said to the watcher at the gate,
"They also kill who wait."
I cried to the mourner on the stair,
"Mother, I hate you for those tears."
To mistress of the ruined hall,
The keeper of the sacred heart,
I brought the mind's indifference
And the heavy marble of my face.
For these who were too much with me
Were secretly against me:
Hostages to the old life,
Expecting to be ransomed daily
And for the same fond reason
From the deep prison of their person,
Their lantern shining in the window
Had signaled me, like cry of conscience,
Had flagged the engine of my will
At local station marked "Farewell."
Confidential Instructions
When, on your dangerous mission gone,
You underrate our foes as dunces,
Be wary, not of sudden gun,
But of your partner at the dances;
Lest you be tamed in dead-end alleys
Where the mind's virtue drops from sight,
Loath to unlink from darling follies
Cuddled in houses of deceit;
Or cozened dearly by the bitch
Of souls, the international spy
Whirling in young men's arms, to each
Mistress, but in old carrion's pay.
STANLEY
J.
KUNIT'Z
PARTISAN
REVIEW
MacLeish and
Proletarian Poetry
ALAN CALMER
READING this book* makes one think of the pas-
sage in
The Sacred Wood
which refers to the "his-
toricalsense" of the poet-that
sense of both the
timeless and the temporal which identifies a writer
with tradition at the same mor..~nt that it makes
him "acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity. "
This quality is present in MacLeish's most forth-
right political poems. In "Speech to those who say
Comrade," for example, he turns to the most com-
mon term and experience of the revolutionary move-
ment; yet his response to it is genuinely poetic, and
traditionally so. This is achieved not alone by beauty
of phrase and nobility of expression; it issues from
the depths of the man's way of seeing the world,
which is the way of seeing of a
poet.
The result is
not a write-up of the slogans of last year's May Day,
nor of events whose description falls within the lim-
its of prose; it is a concentrated, universalized senti-
ment, which evokes the timeless as well as the tem-
poral essence of modern comradeship, and the time-
less and the temporal together. To do this, not only
without effusion but with the dignity of classic ut-
terance; to recapture not only what is constant in
this belief but to illumine what is immediate, and at
the same time to deepen its permanence through its
immediacy-to do this with a concept like brother-
hood,
in the third decade of the twentieth century,
is no mean accomplishment:
The brotherhood is not by the blood certainly:
But neither are men brothers by speech-by saying so:
Men are brothers by life lwed and are hurt for it:
Who are the born brothers in truth? The puddlers
Scorched by the same flame in the same foundries:
Those who have spit
on
the same boards with the blood in it:
Those that htlfJe hidden and hunted and all such-
Fought together: labored together: they carry the
Common look like a card and they pass touching.
Throughout
Public Speech
the presence of this
"historic sense" can be felt-equally in the last ten
love lyrics which make up half of the collection, and
in the verse of public statement. It is in "Speech to a
crowd," with its materialist emphasis and its conclud-
ing exhortation: "The world was always yours: you
would not take it." It is in "Pole star for this year,"
from the opening stanza with its cold sense of etern-
• Public
Spuc!J,
by Archibald MacLeish. Farrar and Rinehart. $1.00.
