328
PARTISAN REVIEW
* *
Here where no image sinks to truth
And the black sun kindles planets in noon air
The lover leads a form eclipsed, opaque
Past a .smoked-glass parterre
Towards the first ghostliness he guessed in her.
He bends her to a dazzling lake
...
If the lens winks, it winds them who knows where.
What is really true where images and reflections rest in each other
like Chinese boxes? Leaning over the fountain's side, staring at the re–
flections, the poet says that "no image sinks to truth," a line that, by its
oblique reference to a photographic negative sinking down in the de–
veloping pan, radically questions all appearances. The peaceful land–
scaped garden, the quiet, possibly dull girl sitting there, are reversed in
the negative into a scene and a Negress of exotic wildness.
It
is pos–
sibly in this dark tumultuous world, image of the poet's subconscious,
that reality is to be found. But isolated in this private world, how is
love, which is a coming together of two persons, released? The last
stanza is a metaphoric descent into this underworld, a descent from ap–
pearances in search of some reality. But it seems, in this poem, an
al–
most despairing search. The loved object has already become a ghost,
"a form eclipsed," for the lover, incommunicado in himself, cannot
sustain a sense of her otherness. But if the sought reality is found, the
last two lines hint of the possibility of a return to the world of light
and life.
The total effect of the book, however, is not at all one of descent
and exclusion. "The Lovers," for example, is based on an image as
striking as any Donne ever used to suggest the merging identities of
lovers, and in the total poem it moves towards a firmly modelled
resolution:
They met in loving like the hands of one
Who having worked six days wit;h creature and plant
Washes his hands before
I
the evening meal.
Reflected in a basin out of doors
The golden sky receives his hands beneath
Its coldly wishing surface, washing them
Of all perhaps but what of one another
Each with its five perceptions holds.
