BOO KS
251
have been reprinted entire. There are weak parts, but it is one poem.
It doesn't seem to try to be an organized long poem, but it becomes
one. In a series of lyrics, invocations, elegies, dramatic monologues,
"travel poems," we see a theme spreading from the difficulties of
personal memory-what can we do with it?-"Tell us that love /
returns"-to the past of the poet's family, in America, in Ireland, to
American history ("history without memory," but Emerson is here as
if remembered, brought to life in a brilliant "biography"); the classical
world; Greenwich Village of the twenties.
The house, an old ship harbored into alien time,
Dry-docked in broken timber, the ,bricks fallen,
Steel hawsers split, the cornice sprung:
Here the brass plate, another poet's name,
"Where Allen Seeger lived," but read no more-
It even manages a resolution of theme at the end, by not dodging
hard facts-"Ask no return for love that's given" in a poem to a son:
"My classmates a republic of old men, / Yet even here, my hand to you,
my son.... I tell you love returns. / Changing the hour."
There are many other good things, too, in this book. The remark–
able dramatic monologues, the best ones memory-ridden persons calling
to the past:
"If
I were calling someone who had no name, she would
come sooner, Minerva!" The Bluethornes, and Odysseus looking back
with the sensibility of Aeneas. But I have to say something about
those of the new poems which seem to me to
be
unsuccessful. Any
book of poems, of course, has plenty of failures, but I think Mr.
Gregory's might put people off more than some poets' failures do.
They are likely to be too good in their wrong way; they may even
arouse admiration in some places. Let me be brief. The fantasies, full
of transformations, almost work. The
ideas
are interesting but the
rhythms break down and the details again become generalized-as
someone said about something else, "merely ostensible specificity."
More ambitious is "The Ladder and the Vine," an elaborate symbolical
construction in which I fear his theme, so real when he finds it in
concrete situations,
in
events and persons, might seem to be only an
"Invictus" brought up to date. His skill as a poet has gone here to
creating a "poetic" landscape, "poetic" figures. And it is capable of
weak effects other places, too. A Dante poem, reminiscent more of
Longfellow's sonnets about Dante than of the Divine Comedy. But
these shouldn't
be
confused with "Elizabeth at the Piano," "In George
