Shapes pass, familiar and ex–
travagant,
Like stripes on barber-poles that
march and climb
Forever, swaying in the merg–
ing morrice
Of blood and bandage moving
without music,
showing already his fine synthesis
of Freud's
Traumdeutung
and his
Milton studies. Quitting the flaccid
polysyllables of Robinson, and un–
deterred by friendship, he struck
out on his own. In 1912, anti–
cipating
Totem und Tabu,
he
wrought the stunning sonnet
On
Free Will:
Nor anxious claw nor agitated
fang
Rips backward to that cerebral
divide
Down which the cataracts on
either side
Slip strident, but without the
shuddering clang
Shouted when first their should–
er-thunder rang.
Foam follows foam all down
the blanched tide,
Meets mist-smoke rising; all to–
gether ride
And tame the tempo that the
Father sang.
Behold upon the ridge a dubi–
ous drop
Englobing world and god and
genital:
About to fall decisive, it will
stop,
Chin-smitten backward by up–
rushing fear,
And plunge the other way,
while several
Vultures and crows ignor.e, and
disappear.
These lines, which token a de–
finitive rupture with Robinson in
meter and in friendship, were re–
marked in far-off Dublin by Wil–
liam Butler Yeats. And thence en–
sued the extraordinary series of
tart letters (unfortunately lost by
the Irish poet when his house was
raided by the Black-and-Tans)
embracing the whole range of
Western culture. Yeats sensed with
his uncanny intuition what we all
know today, that Greenspan's
verse, making the best of all pos–
sible worlds, transcending Freud's
sordid determinism and Lenin's
meta-Marxist History
(though
some of Greenspan's higher hu–
man insights spoiled the Egyp–
tians of psychiatry), achieved the
inscape of the Catholic-be he
Cardinal or humblest catechumen
-of free will as the slippery cliff
to heaven. Yeats notes the bold–
ness of
and genital,
the deft ver–
bal pyrotechnic of line 5, the
rhythmic magic of line 6, the
quiet, quasi-Sophoclean close
(ironic lines since viewed unfav–
orably by Dudley Fitts, who has
pronounced them tame, and Rob–
ert Hillyer, who can't understand
them) .
The assistant professor's semi–
conscious mind toyed for a mo–
ment with biography: Greenspan
and Lenin still at loggerheads-
