116
PARTISAN REVIEW
lyric poets now wrItmg. That after these few poems, a long way after,
there follow many which strike one as forced, incomplete, not thor–
oughly considered, and some which seem to betray an impatience, an
exasperation with the mere idea of poetry as an art, is something that
does not affect the position. We do not much like to speak of "immor–
tality" in this connection any more, nor even of future times (for who
knows what altogether dreadful nonsense people will admire day after
tomorrow?), but if I may pretend the old usage still to apply, as though
we looked forward to an Oxford Book compiled by archangels, it is
to say that the author of the simple and noble "You, Andrew Marvell"
will have a place there, where room will be denied to many whose flabby
complexities now pass for muscle. This poem reads, surely, as though
it were imperishable; it has no false note, and neither hesitation nor
haste in its grave, steady rhythms, the exact timing of its rimes. Though
in my opinion Mr. MacLeish nowhere fully equals it in any other
poem, this one is yet characteristic of his design, its intention of remote
voyages is uniquely his intention (and responsible elsewhere for his
bad poems as well as for his good ones); its subject is such that his
distantly seen and, so to say,
generalized
details give the greatest in–
tensity with the greatest controlling calm. I am reminded, reading it,
of a passage of Dante with a similar subject: the great lyric at the
close of Paradiso XXII where the poet at Beatrice's hest turns to look
back through the seven spheres at the earth which he has left behind,
below; looking through the orbits of the planets, seeing them vary
their relations one with another, he sees "from ridge to river mouth"
"the threshing-floor which makes us so fierce,"
"L'
aiuola che ci fa tanto
feroci."
I think the MacLeish poem is of that kind, and of that quality
so far as the complete lyric can be compared with the fragment of a
greater design.
Of the poems published through 1933 a number of others keep
their tension and their strength: "The Silent Slain," "Yacht for Sale,"
"Grazing Locomotives," "Pony Rock," "The Night Dream"; of the
satirical pieces, "Corporate Entity" and, perhaps, the Museum At–
tendant's speech from "Empire Builders." Two poems, "Nat Bacon's
Bones" and "Galan," seem to me to approach, in a different way, the
excellence and finish of "You, Andrew Marvell," and as these are
brief I will quote the first of them here:
Nat Bacon's bones
They never found,
Nat Bacon's grave
Is wilderground:
