West of the park

M. L. ROSENTHAL

Near the Ocean Robert Lowell (Faber 18s) The best poem in Robert Lowell's new volume is one of the shorter pieces, 'The Opposite House.' It describes a scene to be viewed, pre- sumably, from the windows' of the poet's elegant New York flat on a street just west of Central Park. Though quite different from them in a strictly formal sense, the feeling and even the sound of the poem recall several of Yeats's pieces in Meditations in Time of Civil War. It, too, moves into a tragic, existential knowledge of the present moment's irreversible realities. Helpless to change the present (what- ever the future may become), we can but get its meaning as far as our powers of penetra- tion into our moment permit: A stringy policeman is crooked in the doorway, one hand on his revolver.

He counts his bullets like beads.

Two on horseback sidle the crowd to the curb. A red light whirls on the roof of an armed car, plodding slower than a turtle.

Deterrent terror!

Viva la muerte!

So ends The Opposite House.' Its contem- poraneity is peculiarly American; the dynamics of the summer riots to come are packed into it. Needless to say that an awareness not merely American is involved, and that the outcry at the end summons up at once the fascist terror of prewar Europe and all the world's present disorders as well. Here Lowell's technique is superb: the economy of the line introducing the theme of the religion of death ('He counts his bullets like beads') that is picked up again, in full volume, at the end; the unobtrusive yet subtly echoing series of feminine endings; the extraordinary concentration of relevant detail, packed in tight and reinforced by the harsh alliterations and the internal rhymes.

The same prophetic, helpless anger enters another of the outstanding poems in the volume 'Central Park.' In this poem we cross the street, as it were, into the great park, seen literally and at the same time allegorically as emblematic of the human, and certainly the American,. condition. There we find yearning, entrapped mankind, symbolised especially by the lovers in the park: I watched the Lovers occupy every inch of earth and sky: one figure of geometry, multiplied to infinity, straps down, and sunning openly . .

each precious, public, pubic tangle an equilateral triangle, lost in the park, half covered by the shade of some low stone or tree.

The stain of fear and poverty spread through each trapped anatomy, and darkened every mote of dust. . . .

Perhaps this passage is slightly condescend- ing. Lowell follows the scene of crowded lust with impressions of the rank zoo-smell near by and of an abandoned day-old kitten whose owner has left it in the park, with heaps of food for it lying not far off and yet 'out of reach.' The whole line, 'Welfare lying out of reach,' suggests the failure of the 'War against Poverty' to reach those whose need is greatest. Impressions of the wealthier class in Manhattan come next. They, too, are trapped and isolated by their advantages : 'Old Pharaohs starving in your foxholes,' Tyrants with little food to spare.' The poem concludes, climactically : all your plunder and gold leaf only served to draw the thief . . .

We beg delinquents for our life. Behind each bush, perhaps a knife; each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub, hides a policeman with a club.

The rhyming tetrameter couplets, deliberately rough and colloquial yet beautifully deployed, recall Swift in, say, 'Phyllis, or the Progress of Love.' The form is very effective. Yet over a span of fifty-five lines (there is one triplet), despite the varieties of off-rhyme occasionally introduced and despite Lowell's usual masterly massing of concrete detail, the effect is finally too contrived and even derivative to have the force of this poet at his best. That is the trouble with someone's being as good as Lowell is. One cannot be satisfied with anything less than his original energy at its peak. I prefer the title-poem, the third of the three really in- teresting pieces in this collection. It is the most difficult poem in the book, involving an attempt to distance the speaker from his confessional materials while drawing heavily upon them. `Near the Ocean' adds a new turn to the ex- perimenting in this direction that marked Lowell's volume before this one, For the Union Dead.

The rest of the book consists of four less successful original pieces and a half-dozen translations. The former group includes an elegiac tribute to the poet Theodore Roethke, a brief private outburst that recalls the mood of Life Studies, and two long verse-essays, again in rhyming couplets, on our present spiritual and political conditions. The transla- tions, which take up twenty-six of the book's forty-three pages, are from the Odes of Horace, from Juvenal's tenth Satire, from the Inferno, and from Quevedo and G6ngora. 'The theme that connects my translations,' Lowell says in his introductory note, `is Rome, the greatness and the horror of the Empire.' Then, wryly, he adds: 'How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is a mystery to me.'

Actually, the connection is self-evident be- tween Lowell's grieving over the lost soul of modern imperial America and the hyper- sophisticated unease of imperial Rome, with its thematic extensions to the marvellous pathos of Dante's conversation with Ser Brunetto in the fifteenth canto of the Inferno and to the Roman examples in the two Spanish poets' treatments of the mutability theme. Some of the translations are in the free mode of his earlier Imitations. In others, he adheres more closely to the text with which he is working. All, however, reflect his disciplined artistic ver- satility. The most immediate is probably the translation from Horace's Odes, 1, 4 (`Solvitur acri hiems'), so touched with nostalgia for the passing present moment; the most vigorous is the Juvenal; the most moving is the Dante —all as we would expect from the nature of the originals, whose life Lowell catches so well. Lowell has not quite made a book of these materials. They do hold together. They are all variations on the theme of the poet's despair as nevertheless, with wit, imagination and anger, he shores these several fragments against the general ruin.

And 'yet it seems to me that he is trying to leave this theme, and this method of dealing with it, a little behind him by now. The passion of the earlier books enters this one only occasionally. He is on his way some- where else, perhaps by way of all his recent activity in the theatre.