IGOR WEBB
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were constant and innocent are inconstant and fickle.
The poet judges himself for what he was and did and for what he is and
does. In recreating the morally ambiguous, dangerous, and even deadly sex–
ual game that no longer simulates danger but has become profoundly
painful, he tactfully employs acute remembrance to display an ironic con–
stancy and its price, which is loss. Earlier---sometime-when he was
perhaps more careless and unknowing of the hazards of his indulgence in
Royal sport than he ought to have been, he was in truth no more danger–
ous to his mistresses than any man might appear to be to one of the King's
deer, even though what he holds in his hand is bread and not an arrow.
It
is perhaps not clear who "with naked foot" did the stalking in that earlier
playful sexual game whose true danger has now worked round full circle
actually to wound him. As a relic of a sometime morality overcome by fash–
ion, by newfangledness, his loss gains him his chastened understanding. His
capacity for satisfaction, associated with repose and stillness-both then and
now--contrasts with the "business" and "continual change" of those who
are now in search of a fulfillment for which they are no longer fit. So the
structure of thought and the structure of emotion in the poem are the
same, arising from the same fundamental moral contrary.
I studied "They Flee From Me" in Winters' class at the very moment
that The Rolling Stones produced their dionysian, mind-blowing version of
"Satisfaction," hardly a plain style piece of work. The song, which in other
hands can have something of the qualities of Wyatt's poem, comes from the
Stones with all the raucous, tactless, raw power of "a strange fashion of for–
saking" quite simply unloosed. For the Stones as for Shelley, "wild" is not
an extreme but the sole emotional pitch that an alive, albeit spoiled and self–
indulgent sensibility can seize as its most effective weapon in the
melodramatized warfare between primitive authenticity and the indiffer–
ence of a self-satisfied, arid "adult" culture.
I assume Winters would have hated it, as he hated the expressive inten–
sity of the Romantics as unbalanced and just this side (and sometimes on
the other side) of being unhinged. But in a century many of whose defin–
ing images barely express a practically unthinkable extremity-the trenches
of Flanders, the piles of starved bodies bulldozed into mass graves in the
death camps, the atomic mushroom, the humiliated faces of those uttering
the recantations of the communist show trials, and on and on-Winters'
field of vision can seem small, narrow, and marginal, excluding rage and
ecstasy alike. What he chose to discover among twentieth-century poets was
continuity with the plain style tradition that, as he saw it, had persisted only
infrequently beyond the seventeenth century and resurfaced with force only
in the twentieth. His wide reading did not seem to have encompassed, say,
Paul Celan, Miguel Hernandez, Montale, or Ahkrnatova. In any event, his
