PARTISAN REVIEW
SONNET IN VAIN
Not sick, nor bent on self-destruction either,
I can not sleep for thinking I must die,
The proud warm substance of the body wither,
Turn humble-cold, and I no more be I.
Hot cruelty, sick love, and lonely sleep
Are not so much to live for, nor this murk
So
permeate with air and fire to keep
The heart assiduous at its crimson work.
But the doom's wonder of the heavy slow
Swing of the turning earth around the sun
Is no mean force that easily lets go,
No paltry fare that hunger gnaws upon.
Son of a rich intolerable swarm
Profusion-bred to die,
0
Rolfe, stay warm!
Maybe I can not see it clearly. Sonnets are toys in our time,
pace
Merrill
Moore, and this one has some of the flaws of sonnet language-"per–
meate," "paltry fare," "lonely sleep"-; moreover, it is very 'young'
poetry in its overtness, as though a man should climb out of his Rilke–
machine and campaign in the suburbs for love, or God, or Spring. True.
But it works nevertheless, not least in the Lucretian nobility of the first
two lines of the sestet; and even
if
I am seeing it in distortion, so amor–
ous is time, I find in it the sting and suasion of the responsible true poem.
The word catches me up as a dust-jacket reminds me that in 1948
I was 'responsible' for calling Mr. Randall Jarrell's
Losses
"a memorable
book." Hardly a memorable phrase, but let it pass: I certainly do not
want to retract it. What I believed then I still believe about
Selected
Poems:
that Mr. Jarrell is immediately and devastatingly right in cer–
tain brief lyrics, notably those dealing with war; that he is impressive
in many of his longer, more loosely organized compositions; and that
he tries both ear and patience when he decides to be Orphic. He is a
satirical moralist, really, of the tragic order; the poetry is a vehicle,
serviceable for swift excursions but unexpectedly lacking in discipline.
I hope so, at any rate: otherwise I should be reduced to the unethical
stratagem of blaming myself for being so often bored by a poet who
should be incapable of inflicting boredom. Let me pass over, then, the
lyrics that we should all admire and envy, and investigate the symptoms
of something else. I find them in "A Girl in a Library," first of all
in
a Note explaining that poem:
