PARTISAN REVIEW
on little wheel caston, and makes fern-seed! footprints with
kangaroo
speed"; or about "this graft-grown briar-black bloom" ?-a phrase that
would have made Hopkins say with a complacent smile, "Now,
that's
the way you use words." But there are hundreds of phrases as good or
better: one goes through "The Steeple-Jack" and "The Hero" hating
to leave anything unquoted. There "the/ whirlwind fife-and-drum of
the storm bends the salt/ marsh grass, disturbs stan in the sky and the/
star in the steeple; it is a privilege to see so / much confusion"; there
one finds "presidents who have repaid/ sin-driven/ senators by not
thinking about them"; there one hears "the 'scare-babe voice' / from
the neglected yew set with/ the semi-precious cat's eyes of the owl";
there
the decorous frock-coated Negro
by the grotto
answers the fearless sightseeing hobo
who asks the man she's with, what's this,
what's that, where's Martha
buried, «Gen-ral Washington
there; his lady, here"; speaking
as if in a play, not seeing her .
..
Even admiration seems superfluous. But expostulation doesn't:
where
is Ambrose the student, with his not-native hat? and the pitch,
not true, of the church steeple? and that "elegance the source of which
is not bravado" that we and the student like? I think that Miss Moore
was right to cut "The Steeple-Jack"-the poem seems plainer and
clearer in its shortened state--but she has cut too much: when the
reader comes, at the end, to "the hero, the student, the steeple-jack,
each in his way, is at home," he must go to the next poem for the hero,
has lost the student entirely, and has to make out as best he can with the
steeple-jack. I wish that the poet had cut only as far as "but here they've
cats not cobras to keep out the rats"; this would keep the best things, the
things necessary for the sense of the poem, and still get rid of the
tropical digression. The reader may feel like saying, "Let her do as she
pleases with the
poem;
it's hers, isn't it?" No; it's much too good
i:&
poem for that, it long ago became everybody's, and we can protest
just as we could
if
Donatello cut off David's left leg.
The change in Miss Moore's work, between her earliest and latest
poems, is an attractive and favorable change. How much more
