696
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mothers great-aunt, who died when I was eight,
Stands by our parlor sabre. "Boy, it's late.
Vergil must keep the Sabbath." Eighty years!
It all comes back. My Uncle Charles appears,
Blue-capped and bird-like. Phillips Brooks and Grant
Are frowning at his coffin, and my aunt,
Hearing his colored volunteers parade
Through Concord, laughs, and tells her English maid
To clip his yellow nostril hairs, and fold
His colors on him.
...
It is I, I hold
His sword to keep from falling, for the dust
On the stuffed birds is breathless, for the bust
Of young Augustus u:eighs on Vergil's shelf:
It scowls into my glasses at itself.
I am not sure how good this passage will seem in isolation; as the
ending of this poem, an ending with every term prepared for, every
symbol established, it is as magnificent as it is final.
"The Mills of the Kavanaughs," the long narrative poem that fills
half the book, is an interesting and powerful poem; but in spite of
having wonderful lines and sections-many of both- it does not seem
to me successful as a unified work of art, a narrative poem that makes
the same sort of sense a novel or story makes. It is too much a succession
of nightmares and daydreams that are half-nightmare; one counts with
amusement and disbelief the number of times the poem becomes a
nightmare-vision or its equivalent. And these are only too successfully
nightmarish, so that there is a sort of monotonous violence and ex–
tremity about the poem, as if it were a piece of music that consisted
of nothing but climaxes. The people too often seem to be acting
in the
manner of
Robert Lowell, rather than plausibly as real people act (or
implausibly as real people act). I doubt that many readers will think
them real; the husband of the heroine never seems so, and the heroine is
first of all a sort of symbiotic state of the poet. (You feel, "Yes, Robert
Lowell would act like this if he were a girl"; but whoever saw a girl
like Robert Lowell?)
Occasionally, for a few lines, the poem becomes so academic and
clumsy that one is astonished: "My husband was a foo1/ To run out
from the Navy when disgrace/ Still wanted zeal to look him in the
face." I do not believe that even Cotton Mather ever managed to
think in the style of that last line.
If
I quote a similar passage- "Soon
enough we saw/ Death like the Bourbon after Waterloo,/ Who learn–
ing and forgetting nothing, knew/ Nothing but ruin. Why must we
