622
DAVID KALSTONE
Yet myth has other uses: it confirms
The heart's conjectures and approves its terms
Against the servile speech of compromise,
Habit which blinds,. custom which overlies
And masks us from ourselves.
. . .
What I mean by a shared sense of community is best seen by read–
ing some of Hope's poems against Robert Lowell's newest volume,
Near the Ocean.
In the opening-and best-of a suite of five poems
that gives the book its title, Lowell is out to show just how much one
cannot assume about the links between poet and society. "Waking Early
Sunday Morning" is by impulse meditative and yet moves toward public
statement. It is ribbed with overheard stage directions to the self
(Stop,
back off
...
Look up
...
Sing softer)
but ends with public address and
a guarded ironic prayer:
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war
-
until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
This closing statement stands as uneasy resolution to jagged drifts of
thought. The adjustments of voice from stanza to stanza - invocations,
questions, commands - are the essence of the poem, just as one blinks
waking up to successive views of one's surroundings. Dissatisfactions enter
the poem gradually, with wakening: private malaise, irritations with
public hollowness merge and are distinguished from one another. But
first there is one of those tantalizing glimpses of adventure and escape,
an energetic and desperate wish that haunts the entire poem:
o
to break loose
l
like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone crushing waterfall–
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.
That free impulse grows paler with day. "The unpolluted joy / and
criminal leisure of a boy" drifts to fears ("Fierce, fireless mind, running
