428
RICHARD HOWARD
Or death, or to believe again
That they worked on the ocean
to
give it
The unchanging, hopeless look
Out of which all miracles leap.
The book
is
full of justice rendered to the visible world by a divining
conscience ("Under the ice the trout rode, / trembling, in the mas–
tered heart / of the creek, with what he could do") and echoes with
a kind of morality collected from the instances of natural order, as
in the luxuriant, leisurely triptych "On the Coosawattee," whose
first section, "By Canoe through the Fir Forest," concludes:
While the world fades, it
is
becoming.
As the trees shut away all seeing,
In my mouth I mix it with sunlight.
Here, in the dark, it
is
being.
The Wordsworth who fled the shape of the mountain when he had
stolen a boat would have understood such sorting out of ethical con–
clusions from natural form and process. The second section, "Below
Ellijay," describes the corruption of the stream by a poultry processing
plant, through whose carnage the canoe advances:
Until we believed ourselves doomed
And the planet corrupted for-ever .
..
And oould have been on the Styx
In the blaze of noon, till we felt
The quickening pulse of the rapids
And entered upon it like men
Who sense that the world can be cleansed .
..
And plunged there like the unborn
Who see earthly streams without Mint
Flow beneath them
. . .
As they dress in the blinding clothes
Of nakedness for their fall.
[((On James Dickey" continued on Page
479J
