MANSFIELD PARK
511
field Park
has a special place. It imagines the self safe from the
Terror of secularized spirituality. In the person of Lady Bertram
it affirms, with all due irony, the bliss of being able to remain un–
conscious of the demands of personality (it is a bliss which is a kind
of virtue, for one way of being solid, simple, and sincere is to be a
vegetable). It shuts out the world and the judgment of the world.
The sanctions upon which it relies are not those of culture, of quality
of being, of personality, but precisely those which the new conception
of the moral life minimizes, the sanctions of principle, and it dis–
covers in principle the path to the wholeness of the self which is
peace. -When we have exhausted our anger at the offense which
Mansfield Park
offers to our conscious pieties, we find it possible to
perceive how intimately it speaks to our secret inexpressible hopes.
w.
D. Snodgrass
MHTlS . ... OU TIS
for R. M. Powell
He fed them generously who were his flocks,
Picked, shatterbrained, for food. Passed as a goat
Among his sheep, I cast off. Though hurled rocks
And prayers deranged by torment tossed our boat,
I could not silence, somehow, this defiant
Mind. From my fist into the frothed wake ran
The white eye's gluten of the living giant
I had escaped, by trickery, as no man.
Unseen where all seem stone blind, pure disguise
Has brought me home alone to No Man's land
To look at nothing I dare recognize.
My dead blind guide, you lead me here to claim
Still waters that will never wash my hand,
To kneel by myoId face and know my name.
