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the age of 23, are chiefly interesting as language. It isn't surpnsmg
that some of Greenberg's best passages are about death. "The dream
of Samuel is death" he says
of
the prophet, punning on his own name;
and the sense of reversion is well handled in certain isolated lines:
When color and form were but a mist
And shadow but the whole,
We may as well turn round again
From all our wayward thrall.
Greenberg wrote in a kind of
lingua. franca,
a curious, illogical product
of
the vast folk-wandering of which he was a part. His language has
little to do, I should say, with that of his fathers; it is a strange mixture
of Romantic-poetic cliche (which he got from books like Palgrave's
Treasury)
and the American language he heard in New York. His poems
often have a rich textural quality, but only occasionally is anything
accurately denoted or connoted. Greenberg's language-what he called
his "conquering script"-was in fact one of the forces which alienated
him from life. And it serves to remind us that even for more fortunate
writers, art can be a Circe's song calling the wanderer-among-cultures to
a final isolation.
Dunstan Thompson, 29, graduate of Harvard, author of two vol–
umes of verse, is back from the long wars.
Lament for the Sleepwalker
is about war-England in the war years is the setting of several of the
poems. He does not step easily and with early maturity upon the world
scene, like the British poets: Sidney, Byron, Auden, Spender, Barker.
His world is a boy's world; it brings to mind .the magazine one used to
read,
The American Boy.
War is a matter of blood and iron all right.
But the only
people
in Mr. Thompson's war are boys, "their pockets
rammed with pistols." The central image is a young god with an argosy
of bright hair. As a somewhat different symbol he was well known to
Melville and Whitman, "this sad
I
Faced, grave eyed, beautiful as steel
I
Young man, his sex a star . . . " The young god is the Friend, whose
friendship is probably false ("the hero as friend" is "stranger than
fiction"); he will slit your throat or pick your purse at the drop of a
hat, especially if you impugn his "good looks." The Young Man is the
beginning and the end. He is Death and Life-in-Death. He is, perhaps,
Life: this tall
Young man, this blond young man, his mother's joy
Must kill her first, his fath er next. He shall ride
To the top of the hill where three thieves died.
The young man is endlessly theatrical.
If
the world is not audience to
