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PARTISAN REVIEW
he makes the linkage arise dramatically from the son's refusal to believe the
obvious fact that he cannot influence the events that he observes. When
shouting fails, and he concludes that throwing an object would have no better
effect, the son decides that he must kill his own son, his mother's grandson.
Stabbing the boy, the Old Man sings a garbled version of Walter Scott's
"Lullaby of an Infant Chief," a poem that not only mentions that the child's
father was a knight and his mother a lady, but speaks of guardians whose
"blades would be red" with the blood of anyone trying to harm the baby.
After reddening his blade with his son's blood, the Old Man explains that he
has freed his mother from her purgatorial repetition, by removing the last
consequence of her act:
I finish ed all thal consequence.
I killed that lad because had he grown up
He would have struck a woman's fancy ,
Begot, and passed pollution on.
Suddenly, he hears hoofbea ts , the play's indication that the mother's
purgatorial reliving of her sin will continue in spite of his misguided effort.
The protagonist's reaction to the horse's approach reinforces the theme
of repetition. "Twice a murderer," says the Yeats character who had earlier
told of killing his father, "and all for nothing, / And she must animate that
dead night / Not once but many times!" While the character calls out tor God
to free his mother from her seemingly endless repetitive action with her
groom husband, to release "my mother's soul from its dream!", the approach
of the horse has already elicited the reader's sorrow for the never-ending
repetition. Like Schwartz, Yeats achieves his effect by reference to his own
text, not to a storehouse of conventional metaphors. The audience never
sees the horse in Yeats's play, and Schwartz's horses are either waves or
wooden ones on a carousel, so both writers also offset their equine images.
However, when both authors yoke horses to eternal repetitiveness, another
commonality arrests the reader's attention. These connections me rit an ex–
ploration of their possible implications.
Such extensive and precise similarities make the option of coincidence
unlikely, while the idea that Yeats influenced Schwartz, although potentially
supported by the tribute which Schwartz gave to Yeats in his title, cannot
overcome the earlier composition date of "Dreams." Factual information
contained in letters and memoirs means that Schwartz could not have gained
access to an advance manuscript of
Purgatory ,
nor have heard a parlor read–
through of it, nor even have spoken with someone who had experienced one
of these opportunities.
