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R. W. FLINT
sImple and long pondered ideas. I recommend the first of these poems
especially as an example of what it means to know one's own mind on
the subject of love.
To my mind the best section of the book, one that sinks piety com–
pletely in enthusiasm for a major new work, is the (undated) play
Penelope
in prose and choral verse. It dramatizes, with an economy that
Pound attempted in his translation of the
Trachiniae
but somehow
flubbed, the final episodes of the
Odyssey
from Odysseus's arrival in
Ithaca. This is executed with a total absence of the modernizing coy–
ness that dogs the patient Horatios of modern classical translation. And
it is thoroughly and magnificently conceived in the mind's eye as a
dramatic poem, by a connoisseur of dramatic action, so that one is
readier to accept Fergusson classic, like the classicism of Stravinsky's
Oedipus,
as the real thing than, say, Sophocles earnestly strained through
an alien language. I suspect that Fergusson's closeness in this play to
what one thinks of as the Greek mind is due precisely to his extreme
economy. As the Greek of Homer and the tragedians was a discovery
of the language itself and a first naming of the elements of the Greek
universe, Mr. Fergusson's English keeps as closely as it can to the busi–
ness of naming and defining. "A-ah! Cry! Cry for joy!" is Odysseus's yell
and only speech when he learns that Penelope still loves him. This noble
and brilliant plainness, set against an immensely spacious emotional
canvas, seems the best verbal equivalent of Stravinsky's terse savagery.
A few lines after Odysseus's yell of joy, the play closes with a true
coup de theatre:
"Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope clasping each
other's hands in a gesture of greeting or farewell, like a bas-relief on a
Greek gravestone," and only one line assigned to choral comment on the
just completed action; "Hail and farewell. Odysseus. Telemachus.
Penelope". The names suffice. We cannot have the ferocity or humanity
without the grandeur.
R. W. Flint
