BOO KS
And crack like rarest china, and until
The storm had snuffed my smoking pipe
I did not realize the change.
There are no straight lines in the sky,
Or
in the sea, or in these seamen.
All is by degrees, so changeable
The senses are like earthworms
Nosed against a boulder.
I have been too long upon the water.
Death and danger ring like children's threats.
Is it presumptuous to think I can do more?
Perhaps some day I'll catch the corner
Of the sky and sea before it mov,es
Beyond my reach.
315
I wonder, is such poetry forever to be slighted as insufficiently
natural, as evincing a formality that renders it irrelevant or out of
touch? Or is it to be patronized simply as lovely, lofty, careful, a
poetry to be enjoyed but not to be taken seriously? There is grave
danger that a generation of readers is to become inexorably attached to
the puerile simplicities of a Snyder, and that it will find no trouble in
dismissing a really important body of work as "academic" or "tradi–
tional," neither of which epithets does justice to Zimmer's volume. But
I suppose there are graver dangers than these to worry about, and
I have the feeling Mr. Zimmer will survive the inattention if it is to be.
His is a passionate resignation, angry and calm at once, as in these
concluding lines from "The Man In The First Wave":
But from some pulsing socket in the hills,
And twisting through the ragged palms will come
A bullet for the draining of my veins.
What use! My father ran upon a bowstring
And fell before the squinting of an eye,
And he gave the .earth no mineral
It did not have before he died.
Robert Boyers
