52
PARTISAN REVIEW
am not suggesting that Graves is necessarily influenced by Wilmot,
but that an affinity exists between them; there is the same disdain for
graceful externals in the writing of a phrase, the same firm diction,
the same love of a directly stated, almost naked paradox where Day
becomes prime error and we loathe to gaze upon the sun.
The same command of language enters the poems of the 1951
selection and in these stanzas from "Questions in a Wood":
Your startled gaze, your restless hand,
Your hair like Thames in flood,
And choked voice, battling to command
The insurgence of your blood:
How can they spell the dark word said
Ten thousand times a night
By women as corrupt and dead
As you are proud and bright?
And how can
/,
in the same breath,
Though warned against the cheat,
Vilely deliver lo ve to death
Wrapp ed in a rumpled sheet?
And in these lines from "The Portrait":
She is wild and innocent, pledged to love
Through all disaster; but those other women
Decry her for a witch or a common drab
And glare back when she greets them.
Here is her portrait, gazing sidelong at me,
The hair in disarray, the young eyes pleading:
<And you, lo ve? As unlike those other men
As
/
those other women?'
And in still another poem, "The Straw," recently published in
Poetry:
Peace, the wild valley streaked with torrents,
A hoopoe perched on the warm rock. Then why
This tremor of the straw between my fingers?
