BOOKS
,\' I
What·should be the vacuum of a dream
Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams
Is being tapped so that this one dream
May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose,
Defying sumptuary laws, leaving us
To awake and tty to begin living in what
Has now become a slum.
483
As we follow the speaker on his meandering pilgrimage in search of an
art
which can never satisfy, a self which can never be defined, the haunting
image of the cinquecento painter repeatedly drifts into his consciousness,
holding the dissolving form of the poem in its "recurring wave of arrival,"
~61hps.ing
the centuries, ushering past into present: an exterior reflection of
the' operations of memory whereby we
can
discover the form and value of
our experience, some of it anyway. But the consolidations are fleeting,
themselves trapped in the continuum of experience of which the poem is
only a fragment. The more the speaker discourses with his mirrored self, the
more he comes to resign himself to his "man-sized quotient,"".what Ash–
bery in an earlier poem calls "This state of being that is not so big after
all."
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eve of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew , except
Here and there , in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
As the poem winds
to
its final pause through the clearest expression of Ash–
bery's obsession, we understand that we cannot even have the consolations
of a conclusion, for we cannot have life whole. But the chastened speaker's
fret in the midst of his resignation is our glad guarantee that the impossible
pilgrimage will resume.
Until it does we would do well to consider the territory gained. Aside
from an occasional cuteness (in "Tenth Symphony" and "Ode to
~ill")
and
an occasionally impenetrable privacy of vision (mostly in the shorter poems),
SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror
is Ashbery's best book-more full of the
