BOOKS
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As it presents itself to the reader, the poem is more a masque than a
drama, for the characters are never fully developed. And yet the voices
begin to playoff one another as the poem progresses, deepening the
impression each character makes, until we come to know them by their
own peculiar mode of delusion. The capacity, for instance, to lose sight of
truth through an overwhelming belief is exemplified by Field Marshall
Busch, who emerges fi'om
:1
meeting with Hitler in which he had intend–
ed to confront the Flirher with what was really happening:
What could I have had in min(P To have
Forgotten his successes-how he led us on
Into the Saar, the
I~hineland,
into Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, while we
Held back and said it was all impossible?
Who saved us, standing firm that first winter
When we would have retreated in ;1 roue
Whose iron determination, and whose...
And those eyes, the eyes
l
Yet, when we have worked through this book, it is difficult for the
acknowledged horror of base deception and self-deception, of cruelty and
moral depravity, not
to
be rendered inert by the incommensurate horror
of the historical context itself. The unspeakable is not necessarily
unsayable, but perhaps the best response to the poem is its own epigraph:
"Mother Teresa, asked when it was she started her work for abandoned
children, replied, 'On the day I discovered I had a Hitler inside me.'"
Of the three poets considered here John lJurt is the youngest, a mem–
ber of a generation of poets now in their forties who are quietly emerging
into prominence. lJurt's first vol unle,
The l'Va)'
DO/I'll,
was a polished and
accomplished collection that already displayed a concern with narrative
and history (including literary history) . This new book,
Work Wlthollt
Hope,
extends that impulse, recovering the past in order to uncover the pre–
sent-though it is a present often enough with a dubious future. The
poellls range between lyric and narrative, sometimes combining into lyri–
cal narratives that can be breathtaking in their beauty and poignancy. Thus,
in "Love and Fame," we have John Keats meditatively watching over his
mortally ill brother on the night Kl'ats writes "When I Have Fears" (a son–
net which ends, "Till love and faille
to
nothingness do sink"):
At the window hl' could count them: one,
Then two, thl'n threl' drops f:11ling in the dark,
