..20
RICHARD HOWARD
of them this time, two very long, and the entire group constituting a
I
movement toward the "productions of time" Blake said eternity was
in love with-an impulse to break out of the archetypal spirals and
into a linear history. There is still the aspiration, of course, to be free
of the personal, what Shelley called "that burr of self that sticks to
one so," to win free of contingency into an existence that would
be
an endless ring of ecstasy and regeneration; still that effort to discern
...
how my light body
Falls through the still ye,ars of my life
On great other wings than its own.
For the bulk of
Drowning with Others,
then, James Dickey is still a
poet of process rather than of particular presences, and of presences
rather than persons, in his apprehension of nature as of selfhood.
As
its title suggests, the poem "Inside the River" is indentured to Heracli–
tus, the master of flux and pattern over fixity and identification; and
if even more of this volume's notes are struck after Roethke than upon
French models, the confidence in his eventual release and the mastery
of his fluviose meters are all the closer to Dickey's consciousness of
his
burden for suggesting the pre-Socratic sage:
Crouch in the secret
Released underground
With the earth of the fields
All around you, gone
Into purposeful grains
That stream like dust
In a holy hallway.
Weight more changed
Than that of one
Now being born,
Let go the root.
Move with the world
As the deep dead move.
Opposed to nothing.
Release. Enter the sea
Like a winding wind.
No. Rise. Draw breath.
Sing. See no one.
Plumbing the water's depth, rising with flame, lying upon the earth,
moving
in
air-the elements and the actions that must embrace them
afford Dickey his
gestus,
but life itself urges a new drama, a modeling
