DICKEY
And nothing prevents your bending
With them, helping their wave
Upon wave upon wave upon wave
By not opposing,
By willing your supple inclusion
Among fields without promise of harvest,
In their marvelous spiritual walking
Everywhere, anywhere.
425
From the magical submersions of
Drowning with Others,
the de–
frocked poet rises or at least advances into a world without explicit
ceremony, conscious of his task and, dispossessed of his ministry, ready
to confront his heritage: he must invent his own.
In 1964, Wesleyan published another collection of Dickey's
poems,
Helmets,
which confirmed him as the telluric maker Wallace
Stevens had called for in prophesying that the great poems of heaven
and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains
to be written. Here, more loosely cast in the emblems of battle and
quest, are the same gerundive preoccupations with process, though
they are now content with the poem as its own reward, rather than
as a magical charm or source of control over nature. The poet is no
longer a necromancer, a magus, but a man speaking to himself, for
others, as in "Approaching Prayer":
Hoping only that
The irrelevancies one thinks of
When trying to pray
Are the prayer
And that I have got by my own
Me.ans to the hovering place
Where I can say
. . .
Using images of earth
. . .
That my stillness was violent enough
That reason was dead enough
For something important to be:
That, if not heard,
It may have been somehow said.
One of the principal
images of earth
Dickey has always used is
that of the helmet, which gives this new book its title: the word
itself affords a clue to his major preoccupations, for it derives from
two old verbs for protecting and concealing-protection, in Dickey's
