546
PARTISAN REVIEW
cation of the poet, which was both philosophical and musical. Yet,
while his cadence ends in dissonance, and his logic leads to dissent,
such a double discordance resolves itself into a harmony of its own.
The raw material of Pasternak's poetry is introspection. Yet
Pasternak treats the Self as object rather than as subject. Thus, in
a non-mystical sense, one could apply to him Rimbaud's formula:
car je est un autre.
Sometimes he seems to treat the psyche as an
alter ego,
as a neutral and an alien being, to be seldom, and
if
pos–
sible only indirectly, approached. Hence the negative hyperbole by
which he claims, in one of his poems, to have appealed in prayer
to his soul only twice in a hundred years, while other men do so at
every instant. Pasternak, with the firm hand of a hunter-or tamer–
always holds his own spirit in his power, like a fluttery, wounded
bird, and often encloses it in the solid cage of a stanza, from which
the prisoner vainly tries to escape through the broken mesh of a
rhyme.
Many critics have remarked that Pasternak looks at the world
with the eyes of the newly born.
It
would be better to say that he
looks at it with
reborn
eyes.
As
suggested by the title of one of his
books, poetry is for him a "second birth," through which man sees
again the familiar as strange, and the strange as familiar. Yet,
whether strange or familiar, every object is unique. To give the effect
of this uniqueness, the poet paints every single thing as if it were
a monad, unwilling or unable to escape from the rigid frame of
its own contours. Such an effect is primarily achieved through the
harshness and hardness of his imagery, through the frequent syncopes
of
his
speech, through the staccato quality of his meter. Rhythmically,
he prefers aline heavily hammered, where no stress is blurred, and
every beat is pounded as in a heel dance. He fails however to extend
this rapid, metallic quality to rhyme, which he treats with the negli–
gence and freedom of Mayakovsky, and which he describes, follow–
ing Verlaine's famous definition
((tee bijou d'un sou,"),
as a "check–
room ticket."
Though some of his poems, especially the earlier ones, are ro–
mantically set against vast exotic backgrounds (for instance against
the lofty mountains of the Caucasian landscape), Pasternak usually
prefers a restricted, bourgeois, and prosaic scenery, such as a park, an
orchard, a garden, or a villa in the suburbs. Yet even "backyards,
