PARTISAN REVIEW
she can put on the armor of Achilles if she wants to, or take her naps
among assorted Winds, Woods, Mountains, Lakes, Islands, Plains, and
Streams, all pleasantly sublet from Mr. Auden.
The Shield of Achilles,
as I have said, suggests work in transit; except in its fine third section,
Horae Canonicae,
it comes as close to inconsequence as Mr. Auden is
capable of coming. The title poem, which has been much praised, seems
curiously insufficient. The contrasted sets of images-the Noble, which
Thetis hoped to see, and the Ignoble, which Hephaestos actually
fashioned-are too neatly arranged; the irony, for all the dexterity and
grace of the writing, is too assertive, as though in demonstration; and
the poem concludes with an automatism of Homeric and almost-Homeric
epithets:
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away;
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Only at the end does a moral point really engage us: the goddess is
dismayed, not because Achilles must die early (and in any event it was
his choice) , but because his brief life was not to be falsified by dream–
images derived from some Grecian Urn. It seems almost an afterthought.
Yet it is the kind of afterthought that stays; and it
is
the forethought,
the very driving thought, of the
Horae Canonicae.
These laic meditations
on Pride, on Indifference, on Disgust, figure the Offices for Good
Friday, which is every day of our lives. Rarely, I think, has the poet
been more compelling than in the best of these pieces, "Sext," "Nones,"
and "Compline." The colloquial Audenesque, which can be so dismay–
ing ("Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy") or so spurious
("As
when past Iseult's tower you floated/The willow pash-notes of
wanted Tristram"), not only justifies itself here, but is the unanswerable,
inevitable instrument. A parade of pastoral eclogues as pretty and as
vacant as Theokritos himself; a lovely song or two; some epigrams, in–
cluding a most perishable epitaph for a cat-and then this poetry.
Finis
coronat opus:
for once the battered tag looks fresh.
Of the remaining books, only Miss Gardner's holds me particularly
-she writes awarely, with a tumbling kind of audacity that could easily
become mannered; she has wit; and she can hear. At this moment of
