350
PARTISAN REVIEW
Woman
To make an alphabet for our children.
Old Man
A chain, a whip, a lock,
A drum and a dancing bear.
Woman
We have got the refugee habit.
Beyond tears at last, into some sort of safety
From fear of wanting, fear of hoping,
Fear of everything but dying.
We can die now.
Old Man
Frontiers mean nothing any more. Dear Greece !
Man
Yes. We can die now.
LAWRENCE DuRRELL
PASSAGE FROM "ESSAY ON RIME"
The Failure in Belief
I made a statement on the previous page
That we have paid for poetry with our blood,
A tabloid fact which sounds unfortunately
Misplaced in an essay. But I refer
To one who
is
the martyr of this age
Of rime, a man whose suicide confounds
The biographer and the critic. I mean Hart Crane,
The poet of our industrial success,
Whose death was equally an act of shame,
Bewilderment and contrition. How else explain
The self-murder of this talent that stands higher
Than any, excepting our expatriates,
Since Whitman? Where in all his verses lies
Concealed the clue to his destruction? What
I n this short life suggests the violent death?
One says his mystic nature, the hand of fire,
Another his maladjustment, and a third
