476
G. S.
FRASER
appear on the stage of his own poems, or prose fables, but directs from
the wings. One has no idea from his writings what he is like as a
person: nor is this probably a question that poetically at all interests
him.
I would call attention to one poem in his verse rather than his
prose volume (the prose fables or apologues I will understand better,
analogically rather than literarily, when I have had longer to read them)
- to the splendid poem, it may be one of the best poems of our age, on
the Judgment of Paris. One has seen or read boringly innumerable
paintings or poems on this story: Merwin is the first poet I have read
who has made it exactly clear, in terms of general human psychology,
what the goddesses were offering (they were all mousetrap offerings,
eat the cheese and get got in the trap, as the goodesses were honest
enough to say) and just why Paris chose the least materially rewarding
and the most emotionally destructive of all the offerings. What Venus
or Aphrodite (Merwin avoids proper names) said was:
Take
her
you will lose her anyway.
Pallas Athene offered Paris power and wisdom, at the cost of
forgetting
it anyway.
Hera offered him power and glory (the rank and status of a
King's son, and perhaps later of a King) at the cost of
suffering any–
way.
Given that all choices must be wrong choices, Merwin conveys
'that Paris made the right wrong choice. I wish Merwin were read more:
young people nowadays are not madly interested in this sort of thing,
which suggests that there
wos
a very remote past, and that it
is
relevant.
I think, as I say, that this particular poem may be a great poem, but
who will there be in forty years to read it?
Donald Hall's poems (his publisher says he is unfortunate in that
they are sold out before they are reviewed, but I wouldn't count that
unfortunate) are deliberately, honestly and undramatically constructed,
decent carpentries, like New England frame or clapboard houses. I
don't mean that he is
wooden,
though you would have to look pretty
hard and long for the burst of passionate impulse or the irrationally
memorable line. I quote a short poem, "Exile," where none of the three
couplets seems to me in itself anything much, but they joist together
as a fairly well balanced, and reasonably lasting, small structure:
A boy who played and talked and read with me
Fell from an apple tree.
