474
PARTISAN REVIEW
Dickey's broken, staggered lines are characteristic of his later
poems and represent at their best an attempt at purification of expres–
sion. Each phrase is now alone with the poet's voice, and freed, as
much as possible, from any discursive obligation that is alien to that
voice. The reader is now alone with the poet's power; there is no
convention of typewriter-return to regularize and deaden response.
What Dickey does with his white spaces is create the medium
through which his poem moves: the air, ether, or amniotic fluid that
sustains the poetic vision at the same time that it draws attention to its
fragility.
In
Mayday Sermon
the spaces are pauses for visionary
strength in the mad oratory.
In
Falling
the spaces become air, the
medium of the fall-the very page is, so to speak, unresisting, friction–
less, indifferent to the force which is going to kill the person whose life
is moving on it.
In
The Zodiac
the printed page refutes the whole idea
of a receivable order. The blank page becomes something that can only
intermittently be charged with meaning.
At one point the poet-hero turns to sex for his own meaning, and
it is one of the most compressed and most evocative sections in the
poem. Dickey catches the misery of knowing there are patterns and
knowing one does not belong, trying, and being worn away each night
when the patterns come out.
Twilight passes, then night.
Their bodies are found by the dawn, their souls
Fallen from them, left in the night
Of pallerns the night that's just finished
Overwhelming the earth.
Fading fading faded ...
They lie like the expanding uni verse.
Too much light. Too much love.
Here, the "witty" associations of imagery tumble into full sentience
and create an unarguable moment of feeling, strange but right. We're
inside the poet-hero's ache at the chaos of experience and at the
changeless forms that preside over the chaos, that alone can give it
meaning, and that work on him most terribly when he tries to replace
them with something living-making him feel only the loss of thei'r
presence, scattering his sense of self, sealing his loneliness.
IRA HAUPTMAN
