464
PARTISAN REVIEW
And so it emerges that we are dealing with the betrothed. With the feminine
smart ship engaged early on to a Shape of Ice. A construction to nature. Almost
a brunette to a blonde. Something was growing in Plymouth docks toward that
which was growing "In shadowy silent distance" somewhere in the North At–
lantic. The hushed, conspiratorial "shadowy silent distance" underscores the se–
cretive, intimate character of this information, and the stresses falling almost me–
chanically on each word in this stanza sort of echo time's measured pace - the
pace of this maid's and her mate's advancement toward one another. For it is that
pace that makes the encounter inevitable, not the pair's individual features.
What also makes their approach inexorable is the excess of rhyme in this
stanza. "Grew" creeps into the third line, making this triplet contain four
rhymes. That could be regarded, of course, as a cheap effect, were it not for the
rhyme's sound. "Grew - hue - too" has, as a euphonic referent, the word "you,"
and the second "grew" triggers the reader's realization of his/her involvement in
the story, and not as its addressee only.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history . ..
In the euphonic context of the last four stanzas, "Alien" comes as an exclama–
tion, its wide-open vowels being like the last cry of the doomed before submit–
ting to the unavoidable. It's like "not guilty" on the scaffold, or "I don't love
him" before the altar: pale face turned to the public. And the altar it is, for
"welding" as well as "history" in the third line sound like homonyms for
"wedding" and "destiny." So "No mortal eye could see" is not so much the
poet's bragging about being privy to the workings of causality as the voice of a
Father Lorenzo.
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Again, no poet in his right mind, unless his is Gerard Manley Hopkins's,
would stud a line with stresses in such a hammering manner. And not even
Hopkins would dare to use in verse "anon" like this. Is this our old friend Mr.
Hardy's abhorrence of the smooth line, reaching here a degree of perversity? Or a
further attempt to obscure, with this Middle English equivalent of "at once," a
"mortal eye" 's ability to see what he, the poet, sees? An elongation of the per–
spective? Going for those coincident paths of origin? His only concession to
the standard view of the disaster? Or just a heightening of the pitch, the way
"august" does, in view of the poem's finale, to pave the way for the Immanent
Will's saying its piece:
