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1.
I think? That I shall never, see!
Up, owe 'em love. Leah's a tree.
Probably not since John Donne's "For Godsake hold your tongue, and let
me love" has a poem opened with such explosive élan.
"I
think?" he rages; and in that fury is a ringing refusal to see life merely in
terms of the "cogitations" that have amazed lesser poets. Here the whole
Eliotic tradition of intellectualized verse is swept cleanly away forever
—
an achievement the more remarkable inasmuch as that tradition had not yet
come into being. But few poets have had antennae so sensitive, been so
unfailing a Tiresias (Therese? Ah yes!) in divining the yet-to-come. Crass
indeed is the reader who fails to sense, in the proemial words, the poet's
curling lip,[1] or who fails to note the
hoot of scorn in the derisive "see" that concludes the line with a vulgarity
ah how voulu! Almost blatant, this effect; and yet, beneath
the
brassy fanfare, what delicate counterpoint of grammatical woodwinds in the
antiphony of declarative mood to
interrogative, an antiphony that becomes harangue when we feel it in terms
of the inner dialogue, the colloquy of a soul tormented by an age when all
values have turned moot. Yet, as always in Skilmer, violence tempered with
amenity: instead of the scowling "will" of resolution, only the disclaiming
modesty of that simple "shall".
Up, owe 'em love. Leah's a tree.
The second line, opening with courage and defiance, can but deepen the stated theme. "Up!" (cf. the Italian "Su! coraggio!") as the poet, confronting the inenarrable chaos of his world, lifts himself from that slough of despond by the Muses' very bootstrap. Don't give love away, he exhorts himself; don't wanton away so rare a substance on the all and sundry. Owe them love; do not pay when payment is
4
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away. . ."
But — oh marvel of art — again the tight-lipped acerbity is
softened
by one of the loveliest transitions in all poetry. After the corrosive cynicism
of the opening, the gentle evocation of Biblical womanhood fuses, as in
Dante, with the mythology of the ancient world, in a line that sums up the
fugacity of all things mortal. "Leah's a tree" indeed; Leah has
become a tree, has escaped from the aggressor's pursuit,
from
the weary wheel of being. When Skilmer says "Leah" he is of course
thinking of Daphne — the names have three letters (if no more) in
common; our poet works by preference in that hallowed
three,
perhaps more meaningfully here than elsewhere, since in his sturdy
American dialect Therese and threes would
have
been pronounced alike. It is no accident that the number of lines in the
poem (12) is easily divisible by three, with none left over. Characteristic
too of Skilmer's esemplastic knack is this grafting of image onto image; it
is
wholly natural that in thinking of the Ovidian Daphne he should conceive
of her a lo divino — see her not as some mincing
pagan, but
aureate in the scriptural halo that Dante too looped like lassoes of tinsel
round her.
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away. . ."
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