DICKEY
423
Here the abrogation of identity delivers Being over to the purely
gerundive; not "I am silent in a white world in which I hunt," but
"Silence. Whiteness. Hunting." From this focus upon action at the
expense of agent, it is but a step to the universe of pure recurrence
that is "The Heaven of Animals":
And
tho~e
that are hunt·ed
Know this
a~
their life,
Their reward: to walk
Under such
tree~
in full kn'owledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling
them~e~ve~
without pain
At the
cycle'~
center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.
Animal recurrence identifies the world, too, of Dickey's other long
poem in this book of commonplace prayer, "The Owl King," whose
first section, "The Call," was printed as an independent poem or
invocation in
Into the Stone;
the poet has enlarged its primal scene:
. . .
in a ring in a meadow
R.ound a child with a bird gravely dancing,
I hear the king of the owls sing
and has thickened the progress of the naked ritual to an entire myth,
as Cornford and Harrison discovered that the classical myths were
developed to explain the primitive mysteries, to rationalize and thereby
recover actions whose meanings were without an explanation. The
narrative element in Dickey's
art
is furthered, too, in its propensity to
enlarge liturgy into something more nearly approaching illumination
("all dark shall come to light"); observation of nature in the added
sections, "The Owl King" and "The Blind Child's Story," transform
the rites of passage into
M iirchen:
Each night, now, high on the .oak,
With his fath er calling like music,
He sits with me here on the bough,
His eyes inch by inch going forward
Through st·one dark
l
burninc and picking
