426
RICHARD HOWARD
world, against the energies of earth, and concealment against those
of the Unseen, crown and prison both. In his first book, Dickey had
spoken of death as "the deadly king in a helmet glowing with spines" ;
had spoken of war as "the mighty head of military gold"; in
Drown–
ing with Others,
the poem "Armor" discusses the use and despair of
such things as helmets:
When this
is
the thing you put on
The world is pieced slowly together
In the power of the crab and the insect .
..
There is no way 'Of being
More with the bound, shining de.ad,
...
In the bright locust-shell of my strength
I have let the still sun
Down into the st·are of the eyepiec.e
And raised its bird's beak to confront
What man is within to live with me
When I begin living forever.
But in this new book, such sacramental intuitions are discarded, and
the helmet is no longer part of the archaic armor of the knight errant,
but now one "I picked from the ground, not daring to take mine
off"-simply a helmet filled with water, a tin hat from which, in the
battle's lull, the soldier drinks-not Galahad sipping from the grail,
but a tired G.!.:
I drank and finished
Like tasting of Heaven,
Which is simply of
At seventeen years,
N'Ot dying wherever you are.
He realizes he has "inherited one of the dead" with the water ac–
cepted from the empty helmet, and imagines traveling to the home of
its former tenant, in California where the poet now lives, and there
he might
. ..
walk with him into the wood
Until we were lost,
Then take off the helmet
And tell him where I had st.ood,
What poured, what spilled, what swallowed.
And tell him
1
was the man.
