178
PARTISAN REVIEW
-Who mocks the mockers when mockery
is
spent?
When will this dry tree I clutch be done shaking?
R. P.
BLACKMUR
WHILE READING HISTORY
Among Florentine cinquecentists taste in manuscripts,
Women, or painters' techniques was the sign;
Old masters, now, were patronized proteges then,
Recording crimson velvets.
And Barnum collected freaks in a gilded age
While buffalo were shot by great shots, hundreds in a day
Groaning monumentally over our expanding country.
Little shots gathered pottage.
We acquire,-what do we acquire now?-
Crying for one more turn, with no slogans that can catch an abstract
meaning,
Reaching beyond our reach for the merry-go-round's gold ring,
Spending words wildly as coin, who are beggars for tomorrow.
LENORE
G.
MARSHALL
1914
Now
IT IS
no longer the war, but a war: our own has taken its
place. The World War is only the First World War; and, truly,
these are photographs not of the world, but of the first world. But
for twenty years, while the wire and trenches in the mud were every–
body's future, how could any of it seem old-fashioned to us?-it was
our death. But when we died differently we saw that it was old.
The men who seize Principe wear little vests and sashes, skirts
with under-leggings, fezzes; one tugs at his arm in a stand-up collar,
peg-top trousers, and a chauffeur's cap; and he himself has hair like
a rope wig, a face the camera draws out into the Mad Hatter's. The
