DICKEY
...
a way Qut of dying
Like a myth and a beast, cQnjQined.
M Qre kinship and majesty
Could not be,
And nQthing CQuld lOQk away .
..
415
in a first book of Orphic utterance, the meditative and metaphysical
gnomons of
Into the Stone,
published in 1960 in the Scribner "Poets
of Today" series. Here the poet has categorized, divided up and dealt
out, like so many divining suits, his first two dozen poems into tradi–
tional categories: family, war, death and love. An imagery of sociabil–
ity, of killing and of ecstasy, is thus the vehicle for ruminations on
life, death and resurrection, and so persuasive, so powerful
is
the
plunge the poet takes into the deep well of his discourse that wisdom
survives the interchangeability of the parts, vision sustains the replace–
ment of elements, and language, quite simply, serves:
1 SQught hQW the spirit could fall
DQwn this mQss-fe.athered well:
The motion by which
~
face
CQuid descend through structureless grass,
Dreaming Qf lQve, and pass
ThrQugh SQlid earth, to. rest
On the unseen waters breast,
Timelessly smiling, and free
Of the wQrld, of light, and of me.
Free of the world in this wise, the self would put off time and matter
and enter the universe of eternal being. But cannot, in safety, without
the mediation of ritual, without the traditional politics of vision that
hieratically arranges matter (and matters), that ministers and of–
ficiates in such negotiations with existence. The characteristic titles of
Dickey's poems in this first assay of "animal music"-titles that sug–
gest the archetypal events and symbols of the Grail legend : The Free–
ing of the Waters, The Fisher King, The Hidden Castle, The Bleeding
Lance- "The Underground Stream," "The Vegetable King," "Into
the Stone," "Walking on Water"--enforce the boundaries of
this
poet's world of primaries in experience. Here is a construct of water in
lakes and wells ("best motions come from the river"), gold of metals
and of the sun ("in
this
place where the sun
is
alone / the whole
field stammers with gold"), stone of the earth and of the alien moon
("the night's one stone laid openly on the lost waves ... a huge ruined
