BOOKS
In the marshes the mysterious mother calls to her moor-
bound chicks.
I love the mother.
I am an enemy of the Mother, give me my sword.
I leap into her mouth full of seaweed.
(" An btra Joyful Chorus")
287
There is however one calm, searching eye in the midst of this
storm. The prose center of the book, "I Came Out of the Mother
Naked," explores the arguments of Bachofen, Newmann, and Jung
that matriarchies only gradually gave way to partiarchies, and that
"the Great Mother can best be understood as a union of four 'force
fields.'" In working through his exciting "psychic archaeology," Bly
achieves with his prose what he hopes for in his poetry: establishment
of community created through an imaginative reading of the history of
his own consciousness and the culture in which it lives, works, suffers,
and sometimes exults. The essay focuses the energies dispersed through–
out the poetry; it also provides Bly with a possible mythology. But it is
as archeologists in search of a community that we finally come to read
the poetry, discovering here a flying turtle, there a cooking pot, picking
our way slowly through a littered maze of Jungian psychology and
Great Mother imagery, backwards in the order of literature down to the
foundation of Bly's theory which gives us the clues we need to
reconstruct the poems. Though he will hate the comparison, Bly's
latest poetry is written like almost all of Ransom's, in the service of a
theory.
Says Valery, " ... there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully
prepared, of some autobiography." Bly has given us a lot of his
autobiography, including these rearranged quotations from his col–
umn in the first 1974 issue of the
Amerir:an Poetry Review:
For my own generation of poets the whole problem of the community has
been an agony....When I publish a book...
.l
try to give something to the
community.... the more the weak function in the writer is developed, the
closer the writer comes to the community, or to ..humanity." ....my weakest
function , feeling, is still poorly developed.. ..
It
follows that if Bly is to develop what, in his view, is his weakest
function, thereby resolving his agony of the community, he should
