174
And to the dark, stars swept from the sky
Flashing downward silently all night.
Give me this hour, God, if nothing elst:.
I'AI~TISAN
IZEVIEW
In
many of tht:se poems, it is the " nothing t:lst:" that prevails, but in all
of them there is an t:bu lli ent creativity at work which countermands the
darker imperatives. At the center of this volunll' is a long narrative about an
itinerant painter who does a portrait fi'Olll a daguerreotypt: of a young
wOl11an recently dt:ct:ased.
It
is a richly detailed and vivid piece. l3ut perhaps
the heart of the book is a series of historical mrratiws that present people
whose failures of will or understanding haw terrible const:quences but
whose behavior is too fully comprehended f()r condemnation. These incl ude
the captain of tht: Calif()J"llian, who misunderstands tilt: Ti tanic 's SOS; a cler–
ical friend of Erasmus who winds up involwd in th,' slaughter of
Anabaptists; or Nt:ville Chamberlain justifying himself
to
himself in 19·+0.
Most affecting, though, is l3urt's recounting of a dirigible ;lccident when
workers , fearing for their lives, let loost: the mooring ropt:s, thereby hoisting
two co-workers into the air. The poet asks what we ;dl ask, what would we
have done in that si tuation)
Cou ld I have kept those men somehow in lillt:)
And if 1 had, lllight not that have killed us all)
I know those men woke nights, despised thelllseives,
Saw in their dreams those two come cr;lshillg dowll.
l3y now they, too, are dead; their l110ral flinch
Is past extenuation, and past blame.
There is a tt:rrible sympathy at work in l3urt's poetry, terrible because
to understand and acct:pt so much requires an opcnness to others' pain which
cannot be separatt:d fi'om ont:'s own.
In
a dark mOlllt:llt ill 1
~25,
Coleridge,
at the end of the poem that givt:s l3urt his book titlt:, wrott:, "Work with–
out Hope draws nectar in a sieve, / And Hopt: without an object cannot
live." The object of l3urt's poetry is a ket'ller understanding of how wt' do
go on working, without hopt: perhaps, but without dt:spair too. To bring so
much lift' to poetry is to bring pot'try to life.
PAUL KANE
