A Dying Light
We have not yet had time to absorb the death of Braque in old age; and as to Louis MacNeice, for the moment one can feel nothing but the initial shock, and begin to call to memory the rich, luminous and intelligent contribution he had made to all our minds. Meanwhile, I think of Theodore Roethke, with whom I spent the day a few weeks before he died: a strong, large man, playing badminton for hours in an 800' sun. He is a poet who treats of sexual love in a way that can refresh us all when we are parched with the cant of the judicial and political intruders into this private domain. Even on the sensual he is capable of most moving humour : 'My neck, if not lily heart, will break, If we do this again.' His five years of love poems following his late marriage will stand when people cannot remember which was which of Denning and Profumo. The delicate lyrical rhetoric which was his best mode seems to mo to be the only genuinely new way of writing poetry which has emerged in the past generation or two. And not only on love, but on death, too: I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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