BOOKS
Free) you will see your e-yes melt back to life)
and neither owl will cry nor the round cloud growl)
the eyes are one calm stare) some pure circle
drawn whe're the ancient
scream of the red-beaked birds and the unheard
voice of an open scroll melt in still song
like the timeless blue of a china bowl.
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The red-beaked birds are Aphrodite's doves) the scroll is the Old
Testament and the New, the china bowl is Eliot's Chinese jar that
still moves in its stillness. This is a very late postsymbolist manner in
great purity, and it is strange, I do not know whether intended, how
the "timeless blue of a china bowl" gets us back in the last line to the
world of brittle artifacts from which the poem was a pilgrimage. One
admires but feels still enclosed. Calm is a prison.
Durrell's latest volume is like a footnote to Trypanis: how a great
liberating tradition, of art and religion, brooded on too fondly while
the world changes, becomes gorgonized:
APHRODITE
N at from some silent sea she rose
In her great valve of nacre
But from such a one
-
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sea)
Scourged with iron cables!
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sea)
Boiling with salt froths to curds)
Carded like wood on the moon)s spindles)
Time-scarred) bitter) simmering prophet.
On some' such night of storm and labour
Was hoisted trembling into our history-–
Wide with panic the great eyes staring
. .
Of man)s own wish this speaking lo veliness)
Of man)s own wish this deathless petrifact.
But the petrifact is itself perishable. In another poem, "Byzance":
Only the objects of their past estate remain)
Dispersing now like limbs in different museums.
The crowns and trumpets tarnish easily)
The tangles of ribbon rot like heads of hair
In cupboards where they kept the holy chrism.
Only the eye in an ikon here or there)
Amends and ponders and reflects neglects
D ead monarchs toughened to a stare.
What would Durrell and Trypanis have to say to Berryman? Or he to
them? One could say that he might say that the past need not petrify,
