486
RICHARD HOWARD
of release that accompanies the daylight recognition of wreckage and
despair. "Pursuit from Under" is a nightmare poem about a boy's im–
agining himself an arctic explorer on his Southern farm, visualizing the
killer whale striking up through the ice at shadows, even while the child's
August weekends are passed barefoot on "the
turf
that will heave, / and
the outraged breath of the dead, so long held, will form / unbreathably
around the living." Like the old explorers, the boy he was "had been
given an image / of how the drowned dead pursue us." And Dickey
again asserts, as in the dichotomy between the magical blue cockpit of
the firebombing and the suburban etiolation of his everyday life, and
as
in
the separation of the modern ruins from the antebellum rituals,
what he knows to be the distinction between recurrence and reality, the
dissension between the incantatory ageless order of transcendence with
its themes of hierarchy, immutability and terror, and on the other side
the prosaic, mortal accommodation of immanence with its themes of
becoming, of change, waste and desperation. James Dickey has searched
deep in himself and wide in the world for a criticism of eternity by
history, of immortality by trapped lives, of sovereignty by freedom. He
is the man who most deserves to say of himself, as he has said:
. . .
the heart of my brain has spoken
To me, like an unknown brother,
Gently, of .ends and beginnings,
Gently, .of sources and outcomes,
so that what was once "Impossible, brighter than sunlight" becomes
Something like three-dimensional dancing in the limbs
with age
Feeling more in two worlds than one
in all worlds the growing
[encounters.
