BOOKS
495
How can he-this city that is man- find the language for what he dreams
and sees and is, the language without which true knowledge is impos–
sible? He starts with the particulars ("Say it, no ideas but in things")
which stream to him like the river, "rolling up out of chaos,/ a nine
months' wonder"; with the interpenetration of everything with every–
thing, "the drunk the sober; the illustrious/ the gross; one":
It is the ignorant sun
rising in the slot of
hollow suns risen, so that never in this
world will a man live well in his body
save dying-and not know himself
dying .
..
The water falls and then rises in "floating mists, to be rained down and/
regathered into a river that flows/ and encircles"; the water, in its
time, is "combed into straight lines/ from that rafter of a rock's/ lip,"
and attains clarity; but the people are like flowers that the bee misses,
they fail and die and "Life is sweet, they say"-but their speech has
failed them, "they do not know the words/ or have not/ the courage to
use them," and they hear only "a false language pouring-a/ language
(misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without/ dignity, without
minister, crashing upon a s·tone ear." And the language available to
them, the language of scholarship and science and the universities, is
a bud forever green
tight-curled, upon the pavement, perfect
in justice and substance but divorced, divorced
from its fellows, fallen low-
Divorce is
the sign of knowledge in our time,
divorce! divorce!
Girls walk by the river at Easter and one, bearing a willow twig in her
hand as Artemis bore the moon's crescent bow,
holds it, the gathered spray,
upright in the air, the pouring air,
strokes the soft fur-
Ain't they beautiful!
(How could words show better than these last three the touching half–
success, half-failure of their language?) And Sam Patch, the drunken
frontier hero who jumped over the Falls with his pet bear, could
say
