644
PARTISAN REVIEW
polish and equanimity. After several disconcerting episodes, the poem
rises to an eerie, gripping hallucination. The reader is left unnerved,
without knowing quite how or why. Just the reverse is true of the long
(809
lines) title poem, also episodic but built to a resonant, plangent
finale. The speaker is a retired American failure, living out his days in
Venice ("The world's most louche and artificial city") and indulging a
series of voluntary memories-the deaths of his parents, of a fellow
soldier-that keep returning him
to
the "wilderness / Natural but alien
and un pitying" that is his personal history. Set against that are the
city's own past history and present blandishments. Like many other
Hecht poems, this is a poem about survival, the unwitting, even
unwanted survival of those spots of time that constitute the self. It is
also a poem-more keen and magnanimous than any Hecht has
written before-about salvation and paradise, the lost paradise that
Proust says is the only true one. Like Proust, Hecht-or rather, his
speaker of whom we grow so fond-searches for it in art itself, in the
dome of St. Mark's or the furnaces of Murano. And finds it finally in
himself, in the primary artistic act of attention-as when he contem–
plates the clouds out his window:
Great stadiums, grandstands and amphitheaters,
The tufted, opulent lillers of the gods
They seem; or laundered bunting, well-dressed wigs,
Harvests o[ milk-white, Chinese peonies
That visibly rebuke our stinginess.
For all their ghostly presences, they take on
A colorfu l nobility at evening.
Ofr to the east the sky begins to turn
Lilac so pale it seems a mood of gray,
Gradually, like the death of virtuous men.
Streaks of electrum richly underline
The slow, f1at-bollomed hulls, those floated lobes
Between which quills and spokes o[ light [an out
Into carnelian reds and nectarines,
Nearing a citron brilliance at the center,
The searing furnace of the glory hole
That fires and fuses clouds of muscatel
With pencilings of gold. I look and look,
As though I could be saved simp ly by looking... .
The description having saved the moment, it saves-or so we deem it
should-the man. And to have drawn us into that redeeming enter–
prise, as Hecht has so intimately, is only permitted the finest artist.
J.D. McCLATCHY
