334
PARTISAN REVIEW
root, and the whole body of this ideal musical being acquires a
serenity, a motionless beauty.
It
is as
if
the old Kronos, having been measured by the mind of
a great Diviner and thus having received a face and a shape under–
standable to us humans-that shape which we call a work of music–
were to dissolve himself, vanish, and in departing, give us a glimpse
of that peace, that order and beauty which live above our time, our
works of art. In the confusion of our era, of our thought and of our
art, with their succession of destruction, waste and despair, the clear
and steady aims of an art like Stravinsky's should give us courage
and hope.
FRANCE
From the Gibbet
My human brothers who live after me,
See how I hang. My bones eat through the skin
And flesh they carried here upon the chin
And lipping clutch at their cupidity;
Now here, now there, the starling and the sea
Gull ravel the grained eyeballs of my sin
Of death : more beaks of birds than needles in
The fathoms of the Bayeux tapestry
Where chivalry baptized itself in blood.
My brothers, if I call you brothers, see:
The blood of Abel rising from the dead
Sticks to your heads and to my hands. What good
Are
Lebensraum
and bread to Abel, dead
And rotten on the cross-beams of this Tree?
RoBERT LowELL
