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obscures and reveals meaning, which lies like a bright object at the
bottom of a pool. Only rarely does Jarrell allow the verbal quality
to sharpen into wit, as in these delightful lines:
A quarter of an hour and we tire
Of any landscape, said Goethe; eighty years
And he had not tired of Goethe. The landscape had,
And disposed of Goethe in the usual way.
Other poems in the volume are of interest, but this poem repre–
sents the achievement. The bitterness of Kees's recognitions
is
re–
placed here by a resigned, but not more hopeful, attitude. The
human condition described is one of such nullity that it presents
time with nothing to erode, and a progression is of course impos–
sible. The poem is brilliantly organized-so brilliantly that it re–
quires several readings before one
is
aware that what is being or–
ganized is really only time itself.
For such poets, men have long been leading lives of quiet des–
peration. I borrow Thoreau's fine phrase here because reading Mr.
Howard Nemerov's
New and Selected Poems
brings Thoreau's
prose vividly to mind. These poems may be taken as another ex–
ample of how intimately the statement of poetry and the statement
of prose share the same virtues. Poem after poem in the present
volume has sent me back to
Walden,
and everywhere I have been
impressed by a similarity that is not, certainly, parallelism, but
which exists in a serenity of temperament, a water-clear and air–
cool vision of reality, that both writers share. The essence of this
temperament is a deep faith in the organic processes of life, a belief
not in mere recurrence, hut in significant renewal. Time is a domi–
nant theme in these poems, but here it is only a measure: a measure
of life:
Consider how the see,d lost by a bird
Will harbor in its branches most remote
Descendants of the bird: while everywhere
And unobserved, the soft green stalks and tubes
Of water are hardening into wood, whose hide,
Gnarled, knotted, flowing, and its hidden grain,
Remember how the water
is
streaming still.
There is no space to comment adequately on these poems, but
I should like to quote the opening of "The Sanctuary." Its language
