158
PARTISAN REVIEW
Lake" or "Firebird ." Yet one should no tice tha t the Lady defines her
Unicorn finall y as a sacrificial symbo l, although the depiction o f its
sacrifi ce occurs in
H unt of the Un icorn,
the se t o f tapes tri es exhibited
in the Cloisters co llecti on of the Metropo litan Museum, and does no t
occur within the calm of the Cluny work. " I would," says the Lady,
" have spared us all from this, if it were possibl e" -but the Unicorn
will mee t dea th a t the hands of a mob, and resurrecti on onl y in Art.
T he fa ted death of the beloved is, so to speak, the bottom line of a
woman-centered sys tem, but then, it has always been the bottom line of
male-centered sys tems: recall, as a well-known twenti eth- century in–
stance, how Hemingway kills Catherine off in childbirth a t the end of
Farewell to Arms,
letting ex-Tenente Henry walk away bravely,
stoi call y, into the rain. The truth must surely be tha t bo th sexes dream
the fa tality of the other (as parents do of children, children of parents),
that arti sts need
to
articul a te such fantasies, and that no healing, of
either indi vidual wounds or of the pain whi ch di vides the sexes, can
take pl ace without development of a deeper consciousness than mos t of
us now possess. Women desire power, as men do. Women imagi ne the
deaths of those they most love, who mos t bind them, as men do. T he
poet, trying
to
be usef ul , says so.
Now the rub. Morgan writes most successfull y in a middl e style,
close to common speech . "Loyalty Oath," which pictures the poet's
subselves as a troop of illiterate protesting picketers she guiltil y tries to
pacify, makes fine comedy in thi s mode. "The City of God," where the
poet is seeking salvati on whil e surrounded by whores a nd pimps in the
street, cockroaches in the ap artment, combines comedy and strong
rhetoric. Several other poems work well on this same level.
But when she moves
to
the lyri c and the vatic, her skill s look limp.
The loose free verse she uses in her major poems has no shape or power
of its own, nor does the language compel interest pas t its surface
content. Lines like "There is a place beyond our struggle/ where I will
take us- / beyond the archetypal .. ." sound em barrassingl y
Ii
ke the
close of
West Si de Story
star-crossed by
C.
G.
J
ung. Pieces of coll oqui al
phrasing go innocentl y to bed with pieces of pseudo- Biblical. I do no t
quarrel with Morgan 's seri ousness, her sense of the iss ues, or her
con victi on that poetry can ma ke things happen. I have been touched
and changed by her work, and pres ume tha t other contemporary
women , and men , will be so a lso. But "Time"
- to
return
to
Auden–
" is into lerant/ Of the brave and innocent. " T o make ideas or idea ls
survive for longer than a season or two, a writer needs not onl y the life
so short, but also the craft so long to learn .
