University of Virginia Library

4.

And so it goes. The world-weariness, the melancholy, Skilmer in the depths of his Hamlet mood, or what he himself ruefully called, in the bad German he had learned from "certain ladies" in Milwaukee, "meines Hamletische Gesauerpusskeit". Does even Hamlet, whom so many have called the "Danish Skilmer", have a line so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable as "A tree that looks it"? — in which the poet accepts the humble monotony of things as they are in their weary haecceitas, the sad fact that they are only what they are, and so fully look what they are, instead of embodying the splendor of their Platonic archetypes. "The interminable pyramical napkin," broods E. E. Cummings — but how sesquipedalian this in comparison with Skilmer's demotic oomph. And from time immemorial this nauseating sameness — old indeed, and more than old. Probably there is no more plangent understatement in the language than Skilmer's simple but despairing "auld". For the poet, unable to tear his ravaged heart from thoughts of Thrane, glumly Scotticizes: "Auld, eh?" he spits out, thereby more keenly identifying Thrane with all he most distrusts in reality. Cosmic gloom induces wide-ranging speculations: the bard's restless mind hovers around the anthropology he loved so deeply, and from what sad strata of the past he must have disinterred his pregnant and touching lines about the Liffs. A Liff, as we know now, is the baseborn son of a Riff father and a Lett mother.[*] But even a Liff, born who knows where in semi-savagery, may hurl the alms of charity (as the miserly Thrane never did), alms that shelter us like eaves from the cold and rook-delighting heaven, alms that are always ready, tout prêts, to relieve us. In his polyglot technique, Skilmer, as so often, again anticipates the practice of Ezra Pound, his foremost epigone: he uses the French words to imply that even the barbarous Liffs have achieved a measure of urbanity, as compared with certain uncivilized Scots he could mention. The touch of Gallic vivacity brightens, but all too briefly, the poem's Stygian verge. (Again, a textual note: some read "A tree that looks two", and explain it as referring to the illusory nature of perceived reality. Rubbish![5]).