BOO KS
6S1
than Mr. Hecht, he has tamed his masters-Wordsworth, HOlderlin,
Hopkins, Thomas and late Eliot, for the most part. Like Wordsworth
he is musical in a sturdily iambic fashion; like Thomas and Hopkins
he is lavish and elaborate in his imagery. He is a Christian platonist
of the sea, finding in the life of the Welsh seacoast innumerable images
of permanence and change, death and resurrection. He is also, in the
best possible sense, a pietist, a prophet of natural energies and the analo–
gous life of the spirit. This may sound banal as I describe it; actually it
is not. This kind of poetry has its serious shortcomings, of course. Being
always more or less at its goal, dramatic only faintly, in the playing
of one element of ecstatic vision against another, it tends to blur fairly
often, to become clotted with significance and too much chiming. The
title poem in 3-stress rhyming couplets seems, in spite of good passages,
to suffer from
all
these defects.
The last, most solemn fires
Teach us that no desires
Can bless as theirs can bless
Who gaue the wilderness
The dignity of line
From doctrine pounded fine.
This
is
more tidy and didactic than Thomas, certainly; tidiness and
didacticism are his chief pitfalls-or a scatter-brained diffuseness.
Hia
faults, however, are a small part of the story. There is handsomely
conceived and executed poetry in this book, nothing quite equaling his
masters but a good deal worthy of their tradition. "Niobe" is an entire
success-a Wordsworthian ode invoking the nature and destiny of a
sea-encircled rock, in 205 varied lines of considerable force and beauty.
Death in our life, Job, Winter, Niobe,
o
mountain-rock that first imagined sea,
Tragedy, we haue learnt from lives that pass,
Can, like ·a note of music, break time's glass;
And we, on whom destruction like a sword
Hangs, in dark fission and the atomic cloud,
M aruel to see the spirit of your grey spars
Guarding a glory nature had denied.
If death
is
measured by the truth we hide
And solace by the love that moues the stars,
Under time's cry, the seabird's constant flying,
Dropping your plummet to the utmost deep
W here worlds and grains turn ouer in their sleep,
Teach us the folds of truth, and your true dying.
