506
PARTISAN REVIEW
This poem, from
After Experience,
I would submit to any skeptical
eye; the title poem is another.
Snodgrass is one of nature's rhymers. No one in this century
has used rhyme so structurally or so semantically or with more
serious wit. From the beginning he uses rhyme on the off-stress,
demanding distortion for meter's necessity: "The hills , the little
houses, the costumes" rhymes with "A tourist whispering through the
priceless rooms ." He rhymes vowels, consonants, dissyllables; he
rhymes impossible words with his ear's exactness. Does rhyme lead
him to song or song to rhyme? Elizabethan song is audible in early
poems,
Proven~al
in later; one remembers that Snodgrass has spent
years making rhymed translations according to original impossible
schemes.
At the start, the song recounts personal loss and betrayal. Loss
and betrayal continue but turn general as Snodgrass perceives hu–
man error (selfishness, treachery, narcissism, murder, lies) first in
himself and then in everybody. Appropriately the personal situates
itself in the historical; behind
Heart's Needle
is Korea, behind
The
Fuhrer Bunker
Vietnam. His vision of humanity , bleaker than Cal–
vin's, accounts for some nervous rejections of his work . It is hard to
take.
Hardest is
The Fuhrer Bunker,
in which Hitler himself, Eva
Braun , Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and the rest of the cast speak
poetic monologues during the last days of the Reich . This poetry of
outrage continually reaches past shock to obscenity, making a
catalogue of sin like Dante's Hell without a Purgatory , much less a
Paradiso.
The fundamental vision, constantly misread , damns not
merely
them,
Germans or Nazis
out there,
but the viciousness we share
with them .
In
no way does Snodgrass let these people off his hook ;
readers find it offensive when they feel the same hook caught in their
own Jaw.
His protagonists defend themselves, of course, consciously by
evasion and rationalizing, unconsciously by splitting attention: In–
dentations in some monologues present minds wandering distract–
edly among topics and obsessions, most powerfully Eva Braun's
monologue when she keeps hearing "Tea for Two." Then there is
Hitler's monologue which zigs and zags among a description of
coprophagy to immediate memory to plans for suicide and to sen–
timental memory of "The cake my mother made me .... "
What relieves this poetry is form. Against expressiveness of evil
