480
RICHARD HOWARD
an automobile graveyard, the dying fall is jacked up by a certain refusal
to go along with the old ceremonies; even as the Balcony Scene is ex–
changed for the back seat of a "34 Ford without wheels," the poet
is
dissatisfied, for his newfound charge, with his old resonances, his mastered
meters:
We left by sepaMte doors
Into the changed, other bodies
Of cars, she down Cherrylog R ,oad
And I
to
my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard
Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the .handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.
Or perhaps this is only the final virtuosity of such diction, and as Eliot
said, its pathos, to be able to articulate only in the formalities of what
one knows what one is trying to find out: "one has learnt to get the
better of words for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in
which one is no longer disposed to say it." There is, either way, a shellac
of complacency that is showing a crackle in itself, for all its luster, in
many of these poems by
A middle-aged, softening man
Grinning and shaking his head
In amazement to last him forever.
Though Dickey will always retain, for strategic use, the rhythms he had
early developed to be those in which he most naturally addresses himself,
entrusts his consciousness to the language, it is evident that a formal
metamorphosis must occur, after
Helmets,
to accommodate the other
change, the transformation of ritual into romance, which Dickey has
effected in his poetry:
.•.
as though I myself
Were rising from stone
Held by a thread in midair,
Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,
Not a masterwork
