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KEY
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of experience which conflicts, at last, with the intuition of recurrence,
an "accident" which counters ceremony and courtesy.
In
the book's
longest poem, "Dover: Believing in Kings," which is a kind of grand
romantic fantasia on themes of inheritance and dispossession, there
sounds the same grave, tender voice, the same chatoyancy of refrain
and repetition, so that where the first stanza ends:
...
In the sackcloth and breast-beating gray
The king wears newly, at evening.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of air, the gulls fall, shaken
- the thirteenth concludes:
...
it
is
I
The king wears newly, in lasting.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of spells, the gulls fall, listening
-and the final apostrophe turns it again:
Who .
..
goes up the cliffs to be cr,owned?
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of England, the king smiles, climbing: running.
It will be noted that there is the same dependence on the gerundive
form, without subject or object, to imply perpetuation of the impulse
itself. Yet in all this ritual action, the hieratic themes so rehearsed in
nature that the world of water and stone, creature and plant, is an
emblem of what runs to its source inside a man; there is a real event:
the poet and his family, the wife and two sons to whom the book is
dedicated, have driven "down the ramp from the boat," have
"watched for channel swimmers / dim with grease, come, here, / to
the ale of the shallows." There is a real woman in the poem, not a
corn queen or Morgan Ie Fay, but "my wife," and the accidental
motions of an individual life are allowed to resist, to oppose, to over–
come finally the onset of myth, and of a history that is static,
Plutarchian:
I hove my father to my back
And climbed from his barrow, there.
Pride helped me pick a queen and get a son.
The heroic drink 'Of the womb
Broke, then, into swanlike song.
One came with scepter, one with cup,
One goatlike back'd, and one with the head of a god.
