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PARTISAN REVIEW
while those touching on social and political experience he labels
"poems of judgement." In solitude, away from society, Bly suggests,
we commune freely with nature and spirit and all that makes us feel
large and whole. In community, however, we compromise and are
compromised, we are driven by greed, motivated by fear, and live at
the mercy of the
tamas gunas.
This book charts the poet's movement
toward integrity and wholeness.
The earliest poems here reflect the poet's apprentice status.
Tender sentiments are tritely expressed in a diction straightlaced
with Wordsworthisms: "For me this season is most sweet," vows the
young swain of autumn . The following line, however, redeems that
confession by its engaging rhythm and evocative image: "And winter
will be stamping of the feet." Had Bly developed along the lines he
traced out for himself, he would have become a conventional tax–
idermist of nature: "The honey gatherers, coming and going,
drive/Their endless circles to the hive." A notable exception is the
longer "Schoolcraft's Diary Written on the Missouri: 1830" which,
though a little fuzzy in details, convincingly fuses narrative, sym–
bolism, and period diction to convey something of the awe and
mystery that must have enveloped the forays of the American
pioneers. Toward the poem's end, the speaker, having just seen a
wounded white bear, declares: "I felt as I had once when through a
door,lAt ten or twelve, I'd seen my mother bathing." His memory of
the accidental trespass of a human taboo illuminates the more public
and deliberate violation of the American wilderness.
In later books Bly sought a language with which to limn the
struggles of the inner man-or, rather, the interior city:
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the water lines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.
"Waking from Sleep"
The mood of the poems is generally ecstatic: "Oh, on an early morn–
ing I think I shall live forever." Bly's sense of the numinous probably
owes something to his study of the Christian mystics Boehme and
Eckhart, both of whom saw the divine as immanent rather than tran–
scendent. Drawn mainly from
The Silence in the Snowy Fields,
and in–
fluenced by Waley's Chinese translations and his own versions of
Machado, the best of these poems are lapidary and comprehensive:
