POETRY
CHRONICLE
And on and on; where would the journey end?
Giotto canceived a tower in pure air,
Heraldic rainbow; balanced on her shell
All beauty woke in Aphrodite fair
As history's fairest. Now to trespassers
On
the volcano's flank the tocsins blare:
Our mare's obsidian hooves foreknelled the end.
653
On
the eve of the War, where indeed would the cultural journey
end? 'A tragic verbal ambiguity exists in Giotto's tower conceived "in
pure air," and the anachronistic trip across Italy in a horse-drawn car–
riage
to view the cathedral cities (a journey I can only conceive being
undertaken
by
a true Bostonian in those days) becomes a race with the
death of much that matters greatly. The consumptive cough of the poor
old horse in the first line is not descriptive but symbolic.
It is no novelty at this late date to point out that American artists
rarely treat the subject of love with great success. One of the poets
dealt with here, being Jewish, is not necessarily confined by the Ameri–
can tradition in this respect, but each of the other three poets presents
his own solution to the problem, and each of the solutions is given with–
in the limiting context of American experience. There may be other
alternatives, especially in the case of contemporary American dramatists :
but such alternatives seem to exist, if they do, within a specialized area
opened up by aberrational psychology, and hence not really in the old
native American pattern of feeling and behavior at all. Perhaps the
most successful of these alternatives is simply that of recognition, turn–
ing an honest and historical eye on the facts of the situation. Since the
situation
is
history, it may be better to keep it so, and so Barbara Howes
treats it in her poem "In the Cold Country," which ends :
. . .
the dooming land
Where nothing can take root but frost, has won.
And what of warmth and what of joy? They are
Sequestered elsewhere, southward, where the sun
Speaks. For all our mermaid vigilance
And balance, all goes under. Underneath
The land's
grey
wave we falter and fall back
To hibernate within the caves of death.
A second alternative, less honest but hardly less of New England,
is that of self-irony. Eliot practiced this in "Prufrock" with great suc–
cess, and almost made a virtue out of the American difficulty of giving
