416
RICHARD HOWARD
stone in the sky") . Here nothing develops, grows or changes from its
essence, yet everything can be transformed into anything else, the
metal sun and stone moon, the winged tree and walking water woven
into a net of correspondences thrown over life like a tarnhelm. And
the energy that knots these elements together, that thrusts them against
each other in harmony or thematic opposition,
is
a circular movement,
a conjugation of rituals: pieties of family, of kingship, of devotion
to the divine Other, a round dance of service and mastery best ex–
pressed, in terms of action, by the gerundive form. In the poetry of
J
ames Dickey, as he first composes it, there is no end to action, one
is always in the process of
it:
"Awaiting the Swimmer," "Walking on
Water," and most idiosyncratically, in the title of his second book,
Drowning with Others:
God add one string to my lyre
That the snow-flxzke and leaf-bud shall mingle
As the sun within moonlight is shining:
That the hillside be opened in heartbreak
And the woman walk down, and be risen
From the place where she changes, each s·eason,
Her de,ath at the center of waiting.
That is Dickey's Orpheus on
his
Eurydice, and the shape of it
is
typical: the concluding stanza of five, heavily yet loosely anapaestic,
finished off with a refrain, a repeated and varying italic comment
which refers the substance of the poem ("Orpheus Before Hades")
to something very old and very early underlying it. Here the last line
has been:
· . .
Whose leaf is the center of waiting
. . .
· ..
And white
is
the center of waiting .
. .
· ..
Where lo'ue
is
the center of waiting .
. .
· ..
When flesh
is
the center of waiting .
. .
and by the time we reach Eurydice's
(C
death at the center of waiting"
we have a kind of morphology of the refrain as Dickey uses it, so that
I
.
as the poet himself does in another poem, we can put the italic lines
together at the end of the poem and have yet another poem, a kind
of mythographic gloss on the experience presented, a marginalia which
accounts for and perhaps justifies the separate poem in this ritual
universe. The device is one taken over from Yeats, the rhetoric
Valerian:
