RAYMOND
J.
WILSON
365
Perhaps he had read them in one of the "old books ... made fine / By eigh–
teenth-century French binding, books / Modern and ancient, books by the
ton," in his childhood house. A passage from a seventeenth-century book,
popular in the eighteenth century, contains the elements of "Adam," "bride,"
"dream," and temptation (possibly sexual temptation); the lines tell what Sir
Hudibras knew in Samuel Butler's
Hudibras:
"What Adam dreamt of when
his Bride / Came from her Closet in his side: / Whether the Devil tempted
her."
As
with Schwartz, dream provides the link between possibility and ac–
tuality.
The dream aura derives partially in both works from their similar
physical setting. In both, the son views events from darkness, and the par–
ents act within a rectangle oflight. "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" con–
tains a darkened theater in which the narrator sits watching an old-fashioned
film.
PurgatmJ
places the parental action in a mysteriously lighted window in
the charred wall of a burnt-out house. When we imagine Yeats's play in ac–
tual performance, the parallel becomes more striking, since the actual theater
(the physical, brick and wooden building) would even more closely match
Schwartz's dream theater. Schwartz's narrator unsuccessfully attempts to in–
fluence his parents; he can have no effect, perhaps because their bodies are
not present, only their projected images. Similarly, Yeats's son, an old man in
the play, finds his parents "Deafl Both deafl And if I should throw / A stick
or a stone they would not hear." At first the speaker presumes that he has
lost his wits - that he is going through a waking nightmare, an interpretation
that would be close to Schwartz's sleeping nightmare.
Both writers connect repetition
to
horses even though such a linkage
does not derive from an obvious, widely-held metaphorical convention - as,
for example, a writer might use sheep to represent a character's lack of in–
dependence. Eternal repetition emerges from two horse images in Schwartz's
story: merry-go-round horses and horse waves. The narrator's parents are
"riding on the merry-go-round," signaling a circular, repetitive relationship:
"My father is on a black horse, my mother on a white one, and they seem to
be
making an eternal circuit." This horse image of repetition reinforces that of
the ocean as viewed earlier by the narrator's mother who had watched as
"again and again the pony waves are released"; these horse waves "arch
their backs," showing "white veins in the green and black" and "finally crack,
dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against
it." Like using sheep to imply excessive submissiveness, waves forever
striking a beach are a conventional notation for repetitiveness, but Schwartz's
linking repetition to horses is not standard.
Likewise, when Yeats connects the sound of a horse's hoofbeats to the
idea of purgatorial repetition, he keeps it fi'ee from any wider code. Instead,
