422
RICHARD HOWARD
Such a world of swords and gyves, parricide and piety in the archaic
surround of the Dover cliffs, can be contemplated but it can also be
left behind; the poet and his family get into the car and drive away,
into their lives. Indeed most of the other poems in this book are vivid
with the tension between the longed-for ritual and the lived reality,
or the stress between an inherited ceremony and an unmediated
response. The poet, in this latter case, walks outside his house, looking
back at his family sitting on a screened porch:
All of them are sitting
Inside a lamp of coarse wire
And being in all directions
Shed upon darkness,
Their bodies softening to shadow.
But by the poem's end the ritual transfiguration, always at the ready
in Dickey's sensibility, has operated upon them, and that same shadow
becomes
...
the golden shadow
Where people are lying,
Emitted by their own house
So humanly that they become
More than human, and ent.er the place
Of small, blindly singing things,
Seeming t.o rejoice
Perpetually.
...
"So [human] that they become more than human"-that
is
one ac–
commodation of the doxologizing vision. Another is the link between
ritual and sport, especially when that sport
is
hunting, exploited in
this book with a little more credit on the side of the quotidian, a little
less assurance that selfhood must or even may be extinguished. Still,
as in "Fog Envelops the Animals," one of Dickey's most characteristic
pieces and certainly one of the most original contemporary poems, as
anything very old seems very original, the magical transcendance can
function in a moment:
My arrows, keener than snowflakes,
Are with me whenever I touch them.
Above my head, the trees exchange their arms
In the purest fear upon e,arth.
Silence. Whiteness. Hunting.
