656
PAR TIS AN REV lEW
here long enough to consider two verses from "The Accusation" in
Mr.
James Wright's
Saint Judas:
I loved your face because your face
Was broken. When my hands were heavy,
You kissed
me
only in a darkness
To make me daydream you were lovely.
All the lovely emptiness
On earth is easy enough to find.
You had no right to turn your face
From me. Only the truth is kind.
* * *
If I
were given a blind god's power
To turn your daylight on again,
I
would not raise you smooth and pure:
I
would bare to heaven your uncommon pain,
Your scar
I
had a right to hold,
To look on, for the pain was yours,
Now you are dead, and
I
grow old,
And the doves cackle out of doors.
I can imagine what D .H. Lawrence would have said to this, espe–
cially the second verse. Still, one owes Mr. Wright some qualification of
one's distaste, for surely the point of the poem
is
that the "disgusting
scar" on the woman's face is matched by a hidden scar on the heart of
the man-Hester's public A matched by the A under Dimmesdale's
tunic. Mr. Wright says his poems have all been written to examine
"exactly what
is
a good and humane action," but this poem goes limp
with analytic self-pity in which a feeling of guilt for personal inade–
quacy is righteously transferred to a scapegoat. Kemp Owyne would
never have felt abused because "Her breath was sweet, her hair was
short." But of course Kemp Owyne was not an 'American, and the de–
ficiency in this poem is partly at least in our tradition of feeling-or
of not feeling. Elsewhere Mr. Wright can often
be
as good as Robinson,
which
is
measured praise.
If
Barbara Howes's poems are finely in touch with the old American
quest for the life of the mind and the senses in Europe, Mr. Robert
Pack and Mr. Hyam Plutzik are in touch with another tradition perhaps
even more central. Two great impressive symbols dominated creative
thinking in nineteenth-century America from Emerson through Whit–
man, who were themselves responsible for the delivery. The first was
the widening circle of Emerson, the point of consciousness expanding
until it took in everything and
was
everything. And there was that
