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PARTISAN REVIEW
bees hardly seems to fit gracefully into its syntactical context, nor am
I quite sure why the dance is "educated." We have lately been told that
bees do indeed have a language, and can give each other exact direc–
tions about the locations of rewarding flower beds by executing delight–
ful little dances. But is Mr. Kunitz following Donne's use of the new
science to this extent? Nor am I at all sure of the meaning of the last
line. Is the procreation of generations figured here, or is it merely a
highbrow variation on Gilbert's charming line, "It's Love that makes
the world go round!"?
These difficulties and uncertainties are compounded through the
remaining three verses. Everything looks elliptical and subtle, but I think
close examination will show that a good many of the "intellectual"
images are faithful old stand-bys tortured out of familiar countenance
by the ruthlessness with which, as Mr. Theodore Roethke has put it,
Mr. Kunitz "can wrest meanings from bleak and difficult materials."
The trouble is that he sometimes doesn't. After perhaps twenty careful
readings of this poem I still do not quite know what happened
in
the
summer landscape with the poet and his love; but more crucially, I
think Mr. Kunitz is in some doubt himself.
The enthusiasm which has greeted this volume, and which decor–
ates its dust jacket, has left me free to stress its defects. But the book
contains some very fine poems, though they all belong to a different
category from these of which I have been speaking, which compose
the majority. The good poems have a clarity and immediacy that come
directly from experience---experience sharply defined and nourished by
words, not obfuscated by verbalism. There are a half dozen or so such
poems
in
the book, but "The Dragonfly" is so superior to them all that
it is the only one I shall cite here. In this poem Mr. Kunitz has used
language so naturally that not until later readings are we aware that
he has also used it with greater art than anywhere else. A revelation of
the contradictions and complexity of death opens from the agony of
a dragonfly devoured by ants which the poet observes on a path. The
poem is a beautiful achievement, and it reminds one again (as so many
other poems of recent years have) of the purity and efficacy with which
animals (and insects) can focus in poetry the fundamental problems of
existence after humanity itself has grown almost too corrupt to do so.
I have no space here either to quote or discuss this poem, but I hope
it represents the direction of Mr. Kunitz's future work.
Marjus Bewley
