360
PARTISAN REVIEW
Or they are studies of the mirages of integrity, of the murderer who
"snatched at the fleeting hem [of peace], though in error." Or they
are a contemplation of our positive incapacity to understand those who
had this integrity in the past:
They will not turn th eir faces to you though you call,
Who pace a logic merciless as light,
Whose law is their long shadow on the grass
...
And speculation rasps its idiot nails
Across the dry slate where you did the sum;
and of our inability to use the insufficient but apparently complete in–
tegrations which were our childhood selves and the places w_hich were
a part of them. You go back to them, like Billie Potts,
To drink not of the stream but of your deep identity,
But water is water and it flows
and the father "is evil and ignorant and old."
You came back.
For there is no place like home.
There is still some discontinuity between action and comment in
"The Ballad of Billie Potts" as there was among the various actions of
At Heaven's Gate;
but the poem covers a really remarkable amount of
ground. I would guess that Mr. Warren is at that point which Mr.
MacLeish reached ten years ago, where a poet of great talent has
earned his inheritance and is ready to use it for his own enterprises. I
do not mean this parallel to sound ominous, for it seems to me there is
reasonable evidence here that history is not going to repeat itself.
ARTHUR MIZENER
