138
PARTISAN REVIEW
of
~n
earnest and serious wit; It
15
a cadet branch (and a good deal
less played out) of one of W. H. Auden's lines, and "News from the
Court" is a typical scion. In it, the poet asks
in
re his Queen's
accouchement
Will it be prince,
or
princess, or still-birth?
What's the most regal anJlWer to a bite?
How many fathoms deep is mother of pearl?
If the watchman says, "Ahem," how goes the night?
His "The Hero with One Face" relates of himself:
They told me gently who I was.
It scarcely mattered. I lay down
And ate the lotos, kissed my crown,
And gazed at Ozma, Beatrice,
And sighed, and was content with this.
And in "Spring Song," "Memento Mori," "'Tan Ta Ra.., cries
Mars .. .'" there is the same cool removal from the poem's subject, on
the one hand, and engagement in its attitude, on the other; these are
proclaimed openly at the end of the last of the aforementioned: "The
raggedy-hafted Mars goes forth, with stars on his heels, / To battle,
twitching our dust behind him like a gown."
Mr. Wagoner has a great deal of control over his diction, and often
when one thinks that he is going to stumble into a posture, or drown
himself in an echo, he will recover. Thus the almost overly Yeatsian
"Epitaph" is saved from mere hand-me-down Crazy-Janeism by the
right gag at the right time: "I kept / Great bitterness in my head /
While she grew up, g.l"ew down, grew fur, / Or froze upon a bed."
If
a poem like "Murder Mystery" perhaps gets out of hand by almost
parodying its author's characteristic manner (" 'We did it.' scream the
butler and the maid"), and if the title poem and "Credo Adoration"
seem to move toward a speculative kind of verse not overly suited to his
rhetoric, Mr. Wagoner nevertheless manages to stake out his own claim
and to mine it efficiently. The ore assays well.
Donald Hall's
The Dark Houses
is a considerably more ambitious
kind of second book than is David Wagoner's. It represents a turn of
attention to the American scene of Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee
Masters mocked and betrayed even more, we are to assume, by recent
hist9ry. The "dark houses" of the title are those whose occupants "make
their houses jails" and who "will take / No risk of freedom for
the
