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PARTISAN REVIEW
adolescent standards of sincerity. Lawrence was closing the books of
Western culture and Whitman was his final text. "Whitman, the great
poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way
ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer.... Pisgah. Pisgah sights. And Death.
Whitman like a strange modern American Moses. Fearfully mistaken.
And yet the great leader." Lawrence's own energies were running out
in frustration and disease; unable to bear the thought of Europe turning
itself into a museum, he was equally impatient with certain European
survivals in America, of which Whitman's doctrine of "merging" was
one. But this Tacitean, Saint-Simonian vision of Lawrence's last days
is precious today if only for the poisons it forces out of our critical blood–
stream. To go on in the same vein, as Dr. Williams makes painfully
clear in his essay,s is to vaporize what Lawrence made exact and con–
crete. For the moment, at least, we don't demand one radiant, un–
equivocal center of our poetic faith.
But when you compare certain passages in Dante with a corres–
ponding passage from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,"
Lawrence's Pisgah analogy seems perfectly just:
Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aere bruno
toglieva Ii animai che sono in terra
dalle fatiche loro; ...
Era gia l'ora che volge il disio
ai navicanti e entenerisce il core
10
dl c'han detto ai dolci amici addio;
e che
10
novo peregrin d'amore
punge, s'e' ode squilla di lontano
che paia il giorno pianger che si more ;')(-
*
The day was going, and the darkened air
Was taking from its toil each animal
That is on the earth .
...
(Inferno
II, 1-3)
Now was the hour which longing backward bends
In those that sail, and melts their heart in sighs,
The day they have said farewell to their sweet friends,
And pricks with love the outsetting pilgrim's eyes
If the far bell he hears across the land
Which seems to mourn over the day that dies,
(Purgatono
VIn 1-6)
(Translations by Laurence Binyon)
5 In Hindus,
op.
cit.
