474
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thoughts of this sort, uncomplicated though they are, seriously
disturb a man's efforts, his activity, the continued playing of the
game. And so in this hour the work of the aspiring poet did not
advance. There was no word worthy of being set down, there was no
thought whose communication was really necessary. No, it was a pity
to waste paper, better to leave it unmarked.
With this feeling, the writer put away his pen and pushed the
sheets of paper into a drawer; had there been a fire, he would have
pushed them into that. His state of mind was not new; it was an oft
experienced and by now tamed and gentled despair. He washed his
hands, put on his hat and coat and went out. Change of place was
one of his well-tried remedies; he knew it was not good, in such a
mood, to stay too long in the same room with all those blank and
all
those bescribbled sheets of paper. Better to go out, and feel the air
and busy one's eyes with the changing spectacle of the streets. Beauti–
ful women might greet him or he might meet a friend; a crowd of
schoolchildren or some droll toy in a shop window might change the
tenor of his thoughts; the automobile of one of the lords of his
world, a newspaper publisher or a rich banker, might run over him
at a crossing; all sorts of chances for a change of circumstance, for
the creation of a new situation.
He wandered slowly through the early spring, looked at the nod–
ding clusters of snowbells in the sad little patches of grass in front
of the boarding houses, breathed the soft, moist March air and was
enticed by it into entering a park. There he sat down on a sunny
bench between the bare trees, closed his eyes and gave himself up to
the play of the senses in this hour of premature spring sunshine: how
softly the air touched his cheeks, with what hidden ardor the sun
already seethed, how tart and anxious the earth smelled, with what
engaging playfulness the little shoes of children pattered, from time
to time, over the gravel of the road, how charmingly and all too
sweetly somewhere in the naked copse a blackbird was singing. Yes,
all
this
was very beautiful, and since the spring, the sun, the children,
the blackbird were
all
age-old things in which man had rejoiced for
thousands and thousands of years, it was really incomprehensible that
one should not be able to make a beautiful spring poem this very day
just as well as fifty or a hundred years ago. And yet it was useless.
The briefest recollection of Uhland's Spring Song (with the Schubert
music, to be sure, whose prelude tastes so penetratingly and excitingly
