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PARTISAN REVIEW
m:ght know something. When I tried paraphrasing the Quaker's stat!:–
ment, I found myself confronting one of my own central problems.
Shortly, I heard myself saying that, in Nature, man alone has the choice
to withdraw from the reality in which he lives, and so has the power
to die,
either
metaphorically or literally. I was specially concerned about
this then, because I had recently returned from my sister's funeral.
It
seemed to me that she, disapproving the life about her and unwilling
to find any other, had withdrawn into a very destructive and self–
deceiving relationship with her mother. This, of course, had 5atisfied
none of her real needs, but she was unable to change her course; she
developed a severe case of asthma. One's breath
is
one's life; it seemed
to me that in refusing to breathe, she had taken the next step in re–
jecting her life. When her problem became progressively worse and she
reached the age at which it must have been clear that she would never
marry or have any independent career, she took the logical last step.
On the morning of the Fourth of July (one year after the storm of
which I spoke earlier), her heart simply quit beating. To die on Inde–
pendence Day seemed an act of terrible and destructive blamefulness,
yet this may have been, in its way, the easiest solution of her dilemma–
she had died spiritually (that is, as an animal moved by aims and
opinions) years before. But I was now once again disturbed about this,
for my daughter had just had an asthma attack. I felt that this was
her
way of refusing
her
life. (It happens that I was wrong about this, but
that has no essential bearing on the poem; what matters is that I
did
believe this and was profoundly disturbed by it.) I felt that I must find
some way to tell her that she must choose what reality was possible–
that she was, of course, full of rage and regret for what she could not
have, but that she was hardly alone in that. She still must choose what
was unavoidable. This was the particular rebirth I wanted that year.
It was not until after the meeting that I realized I had been talking
about my poem. It must have been this whole complex of problems
about freedom, breathing and asthma which had smuggled the Fourth
of July into the poem. This, too, must link with the ironic rhyme-word'
"free" in the passage about cutting limbs off the trees, and again with
the lines about snarling the pigeon in a net, for I apparently felt that
I had helped snarl my daughter in a tangle of smother-love. It seemed
to me-and I have often found this to be so---that my poem could de–
velop a structure adequate to my experience only if, like the old sonata
form, it carried two separate thematic areas at the same time. Plainly,
the whole problem of freedom and guilt, which had at first been so
very subordinate, must now be developed into a major thematic area,
perhaps into the dominant theme.
