138
GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN
"Runes" are late poems, and impressive as a series. They may
be
some–
what surer in their aim than the earlier poems. Yet "Truth" also goes
from thinkable nature, "His blue sound made the image of my thought,"
to the impasse of: "I/But thought the deepening blue thought of the fly."
I feel the impasse is as much in Mr. Nemerov as in the nature of things,
for "Runes" does not seem to me completely subdued to its subject.
At a further level, however, that of rhythm and mood, Mr.
Nemerov's poetry is impressive. His rhythm often determines, for good
or bad, what is being said. As he puts it in "Painting a Mountain
Stream" (a kind of Poetics): "Study this rhythm, not this thing."
Rhythm should modify thing, as water and sleep qualify-in this
poetry-the thought they carry. One must therefore ask to where this
watery meditation leads the poet. The answer is that it leads him to
where rhythm, a middle-being both abstract and elemental, takes shape
as image or concept. The poet evokes rhythm as a flowing circle, the
great round of earth,
natura rerum,
a refluent or reflexive principle.
It is here that Mr. Nemerov's fantasy, though not always controlled,
is most original. In seeking to encompass the totality of being without
metaphysics and by sheer tour de force of imagination, his thought
runs to death, and beyond death to "the other side." Subtle montages
:t.".'""
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