BOOKS
Nat Bacon's tongue
Doth sound! Doth sound!
The rich and proud
Deny his name,
The rich and proud
Defile his fam e:
The proud and free
Cry shame! Cry shame!
The planter's wife
She boasts so grand
Sir William's blood
Makes white her hand:
Nat Bacon's blood
Makes sweet this land.
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Of the hortatory and political poems, the "Speeches" reprinted
from
Public Speech
and
Actfive,
not much remains to be said; they
do not seem to be good poems, and if they were ever good speeches
that does not now appear about them either. The poet as poet knew
what the poet sacrificed as cItIzen, he had spoken about it boldly
enough in "Invocation to the Social Muse":
We are
Whores, FraUlein: poets, Fraulein, are persons of
Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with
Stragglers from either prince and of both views.
The rules permit them to further th e business of neither.
It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers.
Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas–
Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers.
In the long poems the poet's characteristic figure becomes his ob–
session, these works are voyages, their protagonists sailors, explorers
over the sea, into the mind, among the dead. In "The Pot of Earth"
the dying god sails out on his journey, in "The Hamlet of A. MacLeish"
the hero, after passing the night of terror in the Perilous Chapel, goes
forth and fails to found his city; "Einstein" explores the universe in the
mind and at last invades the earth in search of "reality." There is Bernal
Diaz, there is Elpenor, "American Was Promises" has the figure of the
voyage west. The cadences of this poetry are in general long, often
formed in double-harness or placed in parallel series cataloguing de-
