University of Virginia Library

1.

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".

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

despised. How much terser these moving words than such romantic maundering as 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.