THE STATE OF POETRY
489
narrative. Logue has learned much of his compositional method
from Pound - his use of the vibrant image , his way of quick-cutting
to expose the dominant shape of an event - but his eye and his
sinewy rhythms are entirely his own. Here is a section from one of
the battle scenes of
Patrocleia:
Patroclus aimed his spear where they were thickest.
That is to say, around
The chariot commander , Akafact.
But as Patroclus threw
The ship's mast flamed from stem to peak, and fell
Lengthwise across the incident.
Its fat waist clubbed the hull's top deck
And the ship flopped sideways.
Those underneath got crunched .
And howling Greeks ran up
To pike the others as they slithered off.
This fate was not for Akafact:
Because the mast's peak hit the sand no more than six
Feet from Patroclus' car, the horses shied,
Spoiling his cast. Nothing was lost.
As he fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain ,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull.
His dead jaw gaped. His soul
Crawled off his tongue and vanished into sunli ght.
There is so much to remark and to praise : the rich yet accurate
phrasing-"Its fat waist clubbed the hull's top deck"-the forceful
originality of the verbs-"flopped," "slithered," "stapled"-and, not
least , the rhythmic control. Observe how the thronging stresses of
the penultimate line-"His dead jaw gaped. His soul"-set up the
startling li ghtness of the last: "Crawled off his tongue and vanished
into sunlight." What lovely things can result when the crusts are
broken off the classics.
SVEN BIRKERTS
