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PARTISAN REVIEW
present our houses are cluttered and defiled....Before we can
adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped,
and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and
beautiful living be laid for a foundation."
And here in our own century is Jane Cooper, a poet much
concerned with dispossessions:
Houses, houses, we lodge in such husks!
inhabit such promises, seeking the unborn
in a worn-out photograph, hoping to break free
even of our violent and faithful lives.
("Souvenirs")
If bric-a-brac of any sort is the outward and visible evidence
of an inward and spiritual disarray, can Seferis's reference to
stripping be an approving one? There are still other possible read–
ings. "Stripped bare" in "Thrush" may mean bare of people, a
sense which would echo the memorable opening line of the
poem, "The houses I had they took from me." A human pres–
ence is more essential than furnishings, and deprived of that
presence a house may grow crusty and eccentric-in a word,
stubborn. It's not possible to impose any one meaning on Seferis's
luminous line. But I've been ruminating about the cluster that I
think is responsible for the line's unmistakable, if mysterious,
authority: the three words
house, bare,
and
stubborn.
Stubbornly, we choose either to keep our houses as bare as
possible or else to let them fill up-those houses we are lucky
enough not to have had taken from us. This summer as she does
every summer, a rather Chekhovian niece of mine has come to
visit here in Vermont. Predictable in mid-August as the ripening
of apples on the Dutchess tree, my never very latent inhospitality
rises to the surface. I'm fond of my niece, but she is problematic
because she traditionally sleeps in my studio, my own bare
house-within-a-house, which I have a territorial urge to defend
by stripping, filling it only with my own presence, or rather with
my absence-the presence is that of my words.
My words; my hours. The choice of bareness isn't merely a
matter of space; it involves time, too. Appropriately, the opening
