2.
A tree — who's hung? Greymouth is pressed
Upon the earth-Swede, Flo Ingbrest.
A tree is indeed a tree, embodies as nothing else the very essence of the
arboreal. An image of the world's green beauty — but no less an
emblem
of its horror. Skilmer's panoramic imagination sees the tree as a
death-image, a very gallows with its dismal fruit. Painstaking Dantists ("In
our age," the poet dourly quipped, "there are no painless Dantists") may
well see here the influence of Dante's Wood of the Suicides.
We have learned little about Flo Ingbrest — Florence C.
Ingbrest
of 1222 Stitt St., Des Moines. Her very address is known only because it
was found tattooed on the left hip of a sailor washed ashore at Tampa after
the great hurricance of '23. It is clear that Miss Ingbrest meant much to the
poet, who saw in this simple Swedish girl a power participating so fully in
the chthonic matriarchal atavism of the dark earth itself that he calls her
simply his "earth-Swede". Her earthy affections,
however, were soon alienated by the vague and sinister figure the poet calls
Greymouth, a misty shape ominous as any of the ghosts that slink nameless
through the early Eliot. Though much research has been done on the
unknown Greymouth, little has been ascertained. Dr. Woggs Clurth, basing
his argument soundly on the morpheme "rey" in Greymouth, has proposed
that he was really Watson King of Canton, the affable rapist; Dr. Phemister
Slurk, dispensing with what he derides as "evidence", has suggested that he
represents Warren G. Harding, an Ohio politico of the '20's. Cavillings all:
Greymouth, whosoever he may have "been" in the world we think of as
real, now, through Skilmer's artistry, exists forever in the purlieus of the
Muse — slinking, loose-lipped, drivelling, livid with his nameless
vice.
