A Poetic Triumph
GOLDMAN, LLOYD
A Poetic Triumph DEAR MEN AND WOMEN NEW POEMS By John Hall Wheelock Scribner's. 92 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by LLOYD GOLDMAN Contributor, "Carleton Miscellany," "Prairie Schooner," and "Minnesota...
...Intense love, he implies, makes life tragic: You turn to me with the old childlike, shy, Questioning glance that first, in boyhood, took My heart in bondage to those eyes-their look, So dark, so true, be with me till I die...
...One wants to go on noting poem after poem in a book as strong as this one...
...Outside, the darkness deepens, and I guess What darker things the years may hold in storeWatching your face, even lovelier than before Age had given it this grave tenderness Love stretches hands toward, that would shield and bless A face, once young, in age loved all the more...
...Darkening branches loom Beyond the window...
...Wheelock is aware of how tragic and absurd life is-absurd, that eminently modern word-but he celebrates the beauty of life with attitudes that show how ancient and modern he is...
...As the editor of Poets of Today, he has introduced the work of Walter Stone, Donald Finkel, Louis Simpson, and James Dickey...
...It seems almost profane to point out the technical skill in the poem that makes it so touching: the joy that grows with the repetition of We are together, the pathos that comes from the play on the meaning of darkness, the image of extending hands that transcends the last three lines...
...To be able to go from the playfulness of the bland mischief of your smile Still leads me on (still leads him on at 80...
...It is a diction, of course, of another time, but not of another place...
...It is a book so exquisite in its parts that one wants to dwell on its contents...
...From meadowy land, the meadow-lark's clear cry Brings back, like something in an old story-book, The days of our lost youth, and hours that shook Their dear delight upon us in passing by...
...Though all be taken, they only shall not be taken- Immortal, unaging, unaltered, faithful yet To that lost dream world they inhabit...
...And, now, in his 80th year, he has published his 11th volume of poems -the finest of a career that reaches back to 1911...
...And perhaps only a poet in later age could demonstrate the tenderness, the ennobling dignity of sexual love: Slow summer twilight...
...to the stark dignity of Far-off, the sea's voice says it all for us, Saying one thing forever, barely heard is startling and beautiful...
...No greater tribute to life can exist than in those last two lines...
...It contains eight sonnets, for example, that both renew the form and make one want to forget everything-everything, that is, except what the poet is saying...
...Wheelock celebrates life's briefness, for it brings intensity...
...but let me at least mention the title poem...
...They praise, as well, the aura, the mystery, of an aging and ageless woman...
...As a critic, he is the author of an intelligent book, What is Poetry...
...We are together, though no word is said, We are together, and are comforted- A peace, stronger than joy, fills all the room...
...it is all poetry, yet there is not an image in it: I have learned it from them at last, who am now grown old A happy man, that the nature of things is tragic And meaningful beyond words, that to have lived Even if once only, once and no more, Will have been-oh, how truly-worth it...
...Kind destiny holds back the stroke of doom...
...In this century, only Yeats before could reap so much beauty from high, formal diction...
...In its 50 lines, every line rings true...
...Here, for example, is the third stanza...
...The strength, the wisdom, the vision of a man looking back over a life relatively long and seemingly short, are memories full of that joy deep sadness can bring-joy born of sadness for those who are Lost, and all mine, all mine, forever...
...Blessed be they in whom life's ardors runGreat life, whose temporary abode we were...
...In sonnet IV, for instance, he and his companion (Wheelock's good taste never allows her to be identified, but one presumes it is his wife) are chatting humorously about Eliot and James Jones, among others, when they touch, by chance, Upon some sadness suffered years ago and, suddenly, his tone shifts to one of trade meditation...
...It unites the mane of the Greek tragedians with Arnold's Sea of Faith, and adds the existentialist's idea of the Absurd-but with one qualification...
...Only a poet of the highest calibre could rhyme words like "doom" and "gloom" and make one concentrate on their profound meaning...
...Your belov??d head Bends over the pale page by lamplight, shed Like a soft aureole round it in the gloom...
...Reviewed by LLOYD GOLDMAN Contributor, "Carleton Miscellany," "Prairie Schooner," and "Minnesota Review" John Hall Wheelock has distinguished himself as a man of letters...
...And here is the climactic eighth stanza: And there they dwell, those ineffable presences, Safe beyond time, rescued from death and change...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 21
