94
PARTISAN REVIEW
How can our hope ring true? Fatality of guilt
And complicated anguish confounds time and place:
While from the tottering ancestral house an angry voice
Resounds in prophecy. Grant us extraordinary grace,
0 spirit hidden in the dark in us and deep,
And bring to light the dream out of our sleep.
Poem
Night is as fatal as home. There are
In night's retractive fingers or
Water lapping the sky signs enough
To make one push a hand through roof,
Feeling life outside as real as hair.
From touch of fingers or of hair
DAVID GASCOYNE
The intrepid would not hesitate to answer: "Here
The virgin and reflecting water
More amiable than you and it may be wittier
Discloses life on other shore."
Though never attainable that other shore,
Attempted by few who face the sheer
Mud face knowing they
rise
to death
And scream as they hear water beneath
Their slipping feet, no time for a wire
To X for help. Behind barbed wire
Benevolent aunts sit dreaming of war,
More difficult and dangerous grow
Lovers' or friends' clasp, many grieve
For what they imagine that once they were;
And at any time now the detached whirr
___.--~
Of shocked machinery may shock the wooer,
The skylights go out, the dumb water
No longer obsequious as a waiter
Get up and speak: "Everything is over".
Regard then now the long days over
The dark and still attractive river;
Remembering
a
summer idyll
It is difficult to believe life is not well
As
fingers cleverly pass through hair.
JULIAN SYMONS
