THREE POETS
697
mistrust! Ourselves with Death who takes the world on trust?! Although
God's brother, and himself a god,! Death whipped his horses through
the startled sod ;! For neither conscience nor omniscience warned/ Him
from his folly, when the virgin scorned! His courtship, and the quaking
earth revealed! Death's desperation to the Thracian field"-and then
tell the reader that these rather labored and academic lines are three–
fourths of the
last stanza
of the poem, I won't blame him for looking
unbelieving.
The poem is hurt very much by being a sort of anthology of
favorite Lowell effects-situations are repeated, there is even a passage
adapted from an earlier poem; the reader gets confused and thinks, "Am
I in 'Her Dead Brother' now? Here's the stove, but where's the suicide?
Isn't this 'David and Bathsheba' now?" What Mr. Lowell is attempting
to do in
this
poem is often beyond his powers and knowledge (where
narrative verse is concerned everybody alive is an amateur, though
Frost was a professional thirty years ago) ; usually the poet is having to
try much too hard, so that one does not feel very often in this poem the
spontaneity, the live half-accidental half-providential rightness, that
some of the best poetry has or seems to have. Sometimes Mr. Lowell is
having great difficulties, and the rest of the time he is seeking refuge
from them in some of the effects that he has produced so well and so
often before.
He is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always
seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating
voice: "Don't sit there fooling around;
get to
wOTkI"- and
his poor
Imagination gets tense allover and begins to revolve determinedly and
familiarly, like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage. Goethe talked about the
half-somnambulistic state of the poet; but Mr. Lowell too often is
either having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and
working away at All The Things He Does Best. Cocteau said to poets:
L earn what you can do and then don't do it;
and this is true-we do
it enough without trying. As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn't have
enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes
and
disposes-and this helps to give a certain monotony to his work. But
probably the reader will want to say to me, by now, what Lincoln said
about the drunkard Grant:
"If
I knew his brand I would order my
other generals a barrel." And I have put my objections to his long
poem rather too strongly;
it
is a powerful and impressive poem, with
a good many beautiful or touching passages and a great many over–
whelming ones, one of the better poems of one of the best of living
poets.
