620
DAVID KALSTONE
Hope's best poems are about confusions of sexual power and the
way in which it both awakens and destroys the feelings. Here, for ex–
ample, in "The Return of Persephone," the goddess becomes "the girl once
more in all her actions," as she is summoned by Hermes to leave the
underground world of Dis:
And still she did not speak, but turned again
Looking for answer, for anger, for command:
The eyes of Dis were shut upon their pain;
Calm as his marble brow, the marble hand
Slept on his knee. Insuperable disdain
Foreknowing all bounds of passion, of power, of art,
Mastered but could not mask his deep despair.
Even as she turned with Hermes to depart,
Looking her last on her grim ravisher
For the first time she loved him from her heart.
His skill is partly one of reinterpretation. The literary scene is one we
know, but the characters have been assigned new positions on stage,
Persephone hesitant, caught between the "cool, bright glance" of Hermes
and the riveting powers of her familiar majesty. In another of the
mythological poems, Circe, her sensual enchantments gained, finds her–
self alone, rich in words and feelings for the first time, but mocked by
the melancholy speechless world she has created around herself. It is
interesting that Hope can deal with sexuality most subtly when narrating
fables, as in these poems, and in "Totentanz: The Coquette," "The
Coasts of Cerigo," "Fafnir" and a haunting though not entirely successful
"Epistle from Holofernes." In more modern settings ("The Brides,"
'lConquistador," "Morning Coffee," "The Young Girl at the Ball") the
emotions appear blunted, single, a bit crude. The retold myths allow
the play of sexuality as
felix culpa,
a fortunate fall; in the modern
instances he sees only decline - his marriageable modern ladies are
machine-tooled threats to life.
To put it another way, modern settings draw forward Hope the
satirist, jaunty but rather uniformly critical of mechanized, overcivilized
lives. But he rises to the challenge of a fable. His real gift is for narra–
tive - not so much telling a story, as retelling it with an air of wisdom
and experience. The story is a
tableau vivant,
action halted at a moment
of high feeling, nuances revealed by the measured order in which we are
directed to gestures and landscapes. It is an index of the success of recent
American poetry, introspective, often jagged, that declarative sentences,
