BOOKS
while the cliffs beneath them, made
of latent vegetation, the live rock,
and a fall of snow, seems to me to be
the hanging gardens of H ammurabi.
113
The last verse comes close to what used to be called "pure poetry."
Its funct ion is to be an agreeable coda. Yet it is also too expected; and
one of the few serious, as if structural, mannerisms in Mr. Dugan's poetry
is that we tend to be given a noble yet nonchalant ending, some final
but "cool" consolidation. This expectation of a final elegance is derived
from the epigrammatic tradition, to which Mr. Dugan owes a great
deal, and which is mediated, at least in part, by the contemporary revival
in translation of the Latin lyric poets. He has also learnt from it to rely
on figures of thought as well as of speech, and even to prefer these.
The formalized wish, question, quote, and apostrophe ; the contrapostur–
ing of two parts of a single sentence to give the effect of surprise or irony;
the repetitions and enumerations; the ability to set up a strange hypo–
thesis and to sustain it : these amply compensate for the relative absence
of flashier tropes. This is not to say that starker condensations and more
continuously climactic effects are not possible: the third section of
"Elegy for Drinkers" strikes me as a genuine modern epigram:
A beggar with no legs below
the middle of his knees
walked down Third Avenue
on padded sockets, on
his telescoped or
anti-stilted legs
repeating, " Oh beautiful
faspacious skies!," upon
a one-man band.
. ..
He
flew the American flag
for children on a stick
stuck in a veteran's hat,
and offered pencils. He
was mad£' of drunks' red eyes.
H e cried , "Courage! Exceed!"
H e was collapsed in whole
display. Drunkards, for this
and wit h his pencil, 1
put down his words drunk:
"Stand! Improvise!"
About the professional hazards of this poetry, the dangers of
