POETRY CHRONICLE
1149
To steel the will against awareness would banish
The angel who arrives each instant
From the horrific flesh,'
Who warns that power, fear, agony are the life under many,'
T hat the real is the terrible,' that to deny
This unsheathes tyranny.
The fear and the agony and Mr. Spender's experience of it are much
more real in this passage than they are in his early work; the emotion
behind the poem is stronger and almost sufficient to compensate for its
defects. As in most of these poems, Mr. Spender is trying desperately to
maintain his sincerity at the expense of his sense of language, and in–
deed, of sense, in general. The warning against excesses of volition is an
avant-garde moral saw that is by now as startling as "honesty is the best
policy" and a good deal less clear, for we do not know exactly what we
are being admonished to avoid. Is "awareness" meant to be an attribute
of will, which we can separate from it by "steeling"? And what faculty
does the steeling?
If
Mr. Spender means that one can force one's mind
by an act of will to concentrate on other aspects of life and knowledge
and thereby reduce the awareness of human feeling, the only intelligible
meaning I can fit into the context, he has taken good care not to say so.
H.
E. Briggs
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