366
JOHN HOLLANDER
excited me the most. It concludes in generalities and abstractions
set aflame by the concrete experiences that led to their recogni–
tion:
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
R estored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn .
.. )
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
( ...
that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But where they are now (wh ere are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
W hat am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Perhaps it is only because lines like these have been anthol–
ogized into a classic rightness and authority that the distance
be–
tween them and those of the "Summer Knowledge" section of the
book seems to
be
more than one created by the passage of
time
alone. That distance is widened by differences which are not
merely formal, but which involve disparaties between intentions,
subjects and general concerns. The section's (and the book's) title
Poem
begins:
