210
PARTISAN REVIEW
The poem itself, its fable and rhetoric, live cannibalistically amidst the
ruins of other fables and rhetorics; for to Warren not even his successes
succeed finally, but must be consumed in the next attempt.
I have the feeling that this would be an incomprehensible poem
to anyone who had not read the earlier novels, the lyric poems and
"The Ballad of Billy Potts"; certainly, the tone, the almost hysterical
pitch would seem to an uninformed reader excessive, as would the melo–
dramatic occasion itself. No one would scream like this who is trying
to tell us something for the first time; the voice behind
Brother to Drag–
ons
neither sings nor narrates nor speaks (I am talking about the over–
all voice into which all the other admirably modulated voices blend)
but insists,
insists!
This is a bombastic poem in the technical sense of
the word: bombast as in Seneca or the Jacobean dramatists, a straining
of language and tone toward a scream which can no longer be heard,
the absolute cry of bafflement and pain. Such a tone becomes in War–
ren, as in Seneca or Torneur or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ridiculous on
occasion, ridiculous whenever we lapse from total conviction. Even the
simple act of urinating beside the road is turned into a little melodrama:
...
stopped just once to void the bladder,
And in that stunning silence after the tire's song
The July-fly screamed like a nerve gone wild,
Screamed like a dentist's drill, and then a million
Took up the job, and in that simultaneous outrage
The sunlight screamed, while urine spattered the parched soil.
It
is a Senecan tragedy that Warren has composed, a play that can–
not be played, a poem that must be imagined as acted in the high,
ranting style, complete with ghosts and prophecies and dire forebodings,
shakings of the earth and raw skulls, suicides and obscene murders and
crimes too horrible to define. The real climax of action is, in this sense,
not the explicit act in the meat-house, but the unutterable Thing per–
formed by Lilburn on his wife.
There's just no name to lay to the worst things,
And that's what makes them worse than anything,
For if thry had a name, then you could name it.
At least to name it would be something then,
If you could bear to name it
...
And it was an awful thing
I didn't even know the name of, or heard tell–
Or if I had heard tell, I'd plain forgot,
