412
PARTISAN
REVIEW
He took the allegorical horse out into the streets and showed it
almost everything and everybody. This made the poem more human,
and the human more of a poem.
To me, one of the first characteristics of the truly great intelli–
gence-the intelligence of a Leonardo or a Goethe or a Shakespeare–
is
a masculine determination to pursue the idea until either it sur–
renders, or turns itself into a stone. And I do not mean that exhaustive
nagging after effect that has come to be called metaphysical writing.
I mean to describe the kind of intellectual perseverance that, know–
ing the idea may choose to hide anywhere, can follow it through
obscurities, through falsities, through incomprehensibilities, until, in
the end, the idea is found, naked and perfect, in the cave of its own
origins. Just as Leonardo pursued the human body to its skeleton and
Shakespeare pursued the English language to the final violence of
perfect explication:
Adultery?
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery? No!
The wren goes to it and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive: for Glou.cester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got · tween the lawful sheets.
To't, luxury, pell-mell, for I lack soldiers.
Behold yon simpering dame
Whose face between her forks presages snow–
That minces virtue. and does shake the head
To hear of Pleasure's name-
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to it
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend's.
There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit;
burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, tie, pah,
pah. Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to
sweeten my imagination.
