DICKEY
Perfect, with his feet together,
His head down, evenly breathing,
As the sun poured up from the sea
And the headsman broke down
In a blaze of tears, in that light
Of the thin, long human frame
Upside down in its own strange
joy.
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Even in the disjunct life, the captive fate, ritual prevails and the lan–
guage veers back into the cadences of incandescence, life is irradiated
by formality and degree; the round dance presides over action as over
suffering. Only then, once the "performance" was staged, could
Armstrong have risen:
In kingly, round-shouldere,d att.endance,
And then knelt aown in himself
Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done
All things in this life that he could.
But to the degree that it accommodates a secular event, this poem is
an exception in the liturgies of
Into the Stone-the
rest pursue their
celebration in a world of Dying Gods, of which we know that Orpheus
was a prime avatar: "My eyes," Dickey writes, speaking in that per–
sonation, "my eyes turn green with the silence ... where love
is
the
center of waiting." One wonders how a poet came by such an initia–
tion-could the desecrated simulacrum of Southern courtesy have
been still charismatic enough to help him on? What inherited conven–
tion of tribal response has furthered such intimations of nature and
duty? The only answer to such questions will be to discover how the
poet gets
out
of the magic circle he has traced, how he escapes the
hermetic music which already threatens to keep his mind from the
movements of selfhood:
This is the time foresaid, when I must enter
The waking house, and return to a human loue
...
That time when I in the night
Of water lay, with sparkling animals of light
And distance made, with gods
Which move through Heaven only as the spheres
Are mOlved: by music, music.
Two years after
Into the Stone
appeared, Dickey published, in
the Wesleyan series, his second congregation of poems-three dozen
