310
MARIUS BEWLEY
Suavely at evening, smiled, teasing the breadcrumbs.
He whispered: "Patience; listen to the world's
Growth, rustling in fire and childlike water!"
And 1: "Milton and Marvell, like the toady, Horace,
Praised the men of power for the good
They happened on, with bible and sword; the wretc'hed
Hold out their begging-bowls at the wooden gates,
Too poor to weep, too poor to weep with tears."
In the days when
The Southern Review
and
Scrutiny
were still
pioneering, "advanced" literary talk of this sort may have sounded
better, but it could hardly have been brilliant even then. On the whole,
the Englishman has the best of it. The fifth line of the first verse
is
wasted, but the last line is a good summary of what Blake himself miglit
have said. The Celtic poet, replying in the third verse, doesn't even
have the dignity of a literary position. His remarks on Marvell and
Horace are not intelligent, and the last two lines are a pretentious
non sequitur
meant to suggest a spiritual wisdom that hasn't entered
the poem. But that Frenchman, who is apparently meant to adjudicate
between the two extremes, is, with his insistence on ripening wheat and
sex and bread crumbs (the big things against which presumably Blake
and Marvell don't count), a
real
bore. Seated near this "encounter,"
one could only ask the waiter to remove one's glass to a farther table.
Then the whole thing fades out in four lines bringing the metropolitan
atmosphere of Eliot's earlier poetry to mind:
Boxflower scent. Fumes of burgundy.
Nagging children at the tables
A dream's remove from their father's smoking
Along the boul{!lv'ard laid with yellow ev'ening.
Devlin quite honestly wanted to write a literary poem in a
fashionable mode, but a poem with such an origin is almost bound
to be spurious. Although "Encounter" is essentially meaningless, I
have treated it at some length because its central uncertainty seems
to me reflected in an important poem like "Lough Derg." Those slightly
unfocused images and cracking metaphors in the longer poem are rooted
in a foundational weakness, a flaw at the very center of things.
Edward Field, sixteen years younger than Mr. Devlin, won the
Lamont Poetry Prize in 1962 with
Stand Up, Friend, With Me.
Mr.
Field's poetry moves in exactly the opposite direction from Mr. Devlin's.
