POETRY
CHRONICLE
659
begins ideally
inside
Adam. · He
i~
like Emerson's transparent eyeball or
Whitman's cosmic I in "Song of Myself," but the cosmic process has
got caught in a groove and always carries Adam back to the same
apple tree. Emerson and Whitman rejected evil and found it easy to
leave ·behind by naming it something else. But the modern poet whose
universe is threatened with direct destruction reads the awful inescap–
able lesson of that apple tree in every moment of his night. In a strong
poem like "The Rumor" we see how the recognition of evil renders
the old symbols impotent, for Judgment intervening puts an end to a
process Emerson and Whitman had conceived as interminable.
I know nothing about Mr. Hyam P1.utzik, but I gather from his
poems that he is of Polish Jewish descent. Just as a similar fact lent a
distance to Disraeli's imagination, enabling him in his novels and in his
Young England party to view the English aristocracy and Tory ideals
in a simple, charming perspective that would scarcely have been avail–
able to an Anglo-Saxon, so Mr. Plutzik brings a moving, elegiac note
to his modification of Whitman's spiral, so quietly effective and sensi–
tive that it becomes more a matter of personal sensibility than of meta–
physics (though on occasion Mr. Plutzik can be quite metaphysical
enough) :
As the great horse rots on the hill
till the stars wink through his ribs;
As t.he Eenera of horses become silent,
the thunder of the hooves receding in the silence;
A,1 the tree shrivels in the wind of time,
as the wind of Time dries the locust tree-
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved one.
I have been in many towns and seen innumerable houses,
also rocks, trees, people, stars and insects.
Thieves, like ants, are making off with them,
taking them to your old ant-hill.
Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.
What spider made thl machine of many threads?
The threads run
from time's instants to all the atoms of the universe.
In each instant a wheel turns in your head, threads go taut,
and oni of a quintillion atoms is transmuted.
Thus you prepare the futuTi for me and my loved ones.
