692
PARTISAN REVIEW
all only an excuse for some Poetry." And when you read Mr. Wilbur's
"Beowulf," the poem seems about as convincing and appropriate as
Marie Laurencin illustrations to the
Iliad.
Yet the same poet can say
to a sycamore,
Sycamore, trawled by the tilt sun,
Still scrawl your trunk with tattered lights, and keep
The spotted toad upon your patchy bark,
Baffle the sight to sleep,
Be such a deep
Rapids of lacing light and dark .
..
and can say about olive trees in the "heavy jammed excess" of southern
France,
Even when seen from near, the olive shows
A hue of far away. Perhaps for this
The dove brought olive back, a tree that grows
Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
Teaches the South it is not paradise.
These quotations seem to me to have an easy and graceful beauty; and
one is delighted with the wit and delicacy of a passage like
...
Tom Swift has vanished too,
Who worke·d at none but wit's expense
Putting dirigibles together
Out in the yard, in the quiet weather,
Whistling beyond Tom Sawyer's fence.
When someone apostrophizes an eggplant: "Natural pomp! Exces–
sive Nightshade's Prince! Polished potato," or says about a bird's nest
fallen from a tree, "Oh risk hallowed eggs,
ohl
Triumph of lightness!
Legerity begs no/ Quarter: my Aunt Virginia, when"-when anybody
speaks so, you say to him: "Good old Marianne Moore! Isn't she
wonderful?"
But Mr. Wilbur is not influenced by her any more; I
wish he were. His second book seems more affected by general Vic–
torian poetic practice than by any live poet; the reader sometimes
thinks in surprise, "Why would anybody
want
to write like that?"
An ambitious and felt and thoughtful poem like his first book's
"Water-Walker" (an animal-morality poem about St. Paul; it, like
Elizabeth Bishop's beautiful animal-morality poem about St. Peter, is a
member of a genre that Miss Moore discovered and perfected) is a
partial failure, but surely anybody would rather have written it than
some of Mr. Wilbur's slight and conventional successes.
