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the addition of a few later poems. The preface, which is a tribute
of friendship, might well be placed beside some of Johnson's briefer
Lives.
It illuminates Devlin's personality with dignity and brevity;
it tells us some things about particular poems that we need to know; and
it invites strenuous disagreement with several of the judgments it
makes about those poems. Devlin is a somewhat curious case. Though
he obviously possesses unusual intelligence and gifts for poetry, most of
his poems seem to me to go badly wrong. This review will be chiefly
concerned with stating a case against the rather large claims made by
Mr. Tate and Mr. Warren.
Devlin's poems belong to a period when "difficulty" in modern
verse was esteemed as something of a virtue in its own right. As one
might expect, these poems are often difficult for their readers beyond
any reasonable call to duty. This is especially true of "Lough Derg."
"Lough Derg" is probably Devlin's central and most important poem.
The editors tell us that it "takes its title from that part of Donegal
where annually Irish pilgrims gather to pray." They go on to argue
that this poem may deserve to rank with "Sunday Morning," "Geron–
tion," or Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower." "In all these poems,"
they say, "the poets are exploring the difficult region where doubt and
faith have been conducting an inconclusive dialectic since the middle
of the last century." Apart from the fact that this seems to me a
misleading description of Crane's last poem, which, despite religious
imagery, is concerned with the poet's lost faith in his creative powers,
not i08t religious faith, the linking of these poems seems to place undue
emphasis on subject matter alone. Both "Sunday Morning" and "Geron–
tion," unlike "Lough Derg," possess a rich and unique verbal music, and
• their difficulties soon vanish, even for the youngest and most untried
reader, in the face of their poetic logic and total intelligibility.
In the following verses from "Lough Derg" the music is flat and
intelligibility far from total. The poet is at Lough Derg, presumably
on pilgrimage, praying beside Irish peasants whose faith is of a dif–
ferent quality than his own. We are given a look into his thoughts,
taut between prayer and scepticism:
Where prayer was praise,
0
Lord! the Temple trumpets
Cascaded down Thy sunny pavilions of air,
The scroll-tongue,d priests, the galvanic strumpets,
All clash and stridency gloomed upon Thy stair;
The pharisees, the exalted
boy
their power
Sensually psalmed in Thee, their coming hour!
