The years ride out from the world like couriers gone to a throne The years marked with a star, the years that are skin and bone. Perhaps they dismount at last, by some iron ring in the skies, Perhaps they are merely gone, as the white foam flies from the bit, They pass, and the finders lose, the losers find for a space. There are love and hate and delusion and all the tricks of the maze. Days when the sun so shone that the statue gave its cry And a bird shook wings or a woman walked with a certain mirth, When the staff struck out a spring from the leaves that had long been dry, And the plow as before moved on from the hilltop, but its share had opened the earth. So the bird is caught for an instant, and so the bird escapes. The years are not halted by it. The losers and finders wait. The years move on toward the sunset, the tall far-trafficking shapes, Each with a bag of news to lay at a ghostly gate. Riders shaking the heart with the hoofs that will not cease, Will you never lie stretched in marble, the hands crossed over the breast, 1935 All night they marched, the infantrymen under pack, The gas mask lay like a blot on the empty chest, The slanting helmets were spattered with rust and mold, And the guns rolled, and the tanks, but there was no sound, Where the skeletons strung their wire on disputed ground. . . . "It is seventeen years," I cried. "You must come no more. We know your names. We know that you are the dead. Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war?" Horace Gregory ORACE GREGORY was born April 10, 1898, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of English, H rich, and German descent. He attended the Milwaukee School of Fine Arts and, after a year of study under a tutor, went to the German English Academy, and then to the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated in 1923. Then came six years of free lance writing, chiefly book-reviewing, in New York, where he mar ried Marya Zaturenska, the poet. He has been on the English faculty at Sarah Lawrence College since 1933. Gregory at first was entirely under the spell of the classics; after reading Byron, he turned to Landor, Pope, and Dryden. At college his interests became completely Latinized, and, though he dropped his classicism after seeing the tenements and poverty-ridden alleys of the sodden Chelsea section of Whitman's "glorious Mannahatta," enough persisted so that he translated The Poems of Catullus (1931), rendering them, however, in the American idiom. There was a "first" book of traditional lyrics which Gregory destroyed upon his arrival in New York; a few years later he published Chelsea Rooming House. Chelsea Rooming House (1930) is a half-detached, half-indignant work; a set of monologues dramatizing the lives of those crowded into the slums of New York's lower west side. Its observation is keen to the point of penetration; its sense of sympathy is surpassed only by the faintly restrained sense of outrage. There is no doubt about Gregory's social sentiments nor his political preferences, but he does not resort to polemics or propaganda. He persuades the reader by the integrity of his poetry. No Retreat (1933) is a more lyrical collection. "Poems for My Daughter" and "Good Friday" owe something to T. S. Eliot's juxtaposition of the classic-rhetorical and the sharply colloquial, but the basic tone is Gregory's, and "Valediction to My Contemporaries" is both biographically and esthetically authentic. Chorus for Survival (1935) is the most frankly personal of Gregory's volumes. The intense self-participation is declared in the eloquent "Prologue," which is a sort of Prothalamion-1935 Model, with its nervous music. It lifts itself vividly in “Ask no return," nostalgically in the poems recalling the poet's youth by the Great Lakes, symbolically in the section in which Emerson points an American panorama, gravely in the concluding lines "For you, my son." Some may object to a certain obscurity of utterance, a confusion of image and effect. But such obscurity (where it exists) is not willful. Nor does it proceed from a desire to overcompensate for a paucity of the imagination. The figures follow so rapidly that the poet's mind leaps from one to the other, taking the ellipses in his stride, and the reader is sometimes unable to take the leap with him. Poems: 1930-1940 (1941) is a selection from Gregory's other volumes with the addition of a new group of poems. The book is not a mere assembly of verses for various occasions, but a set of recurrent themes with clarifying key poems. Few of the poems can be read as straight narratives, for they indulge in a freedom of form and effect; they employ the montage of cinema, the interrupting voice of the radio, the summons of the quick-changing telephone dial. Like Eliot, Gregory is fond of the dissonant chord and the unresolved suspense; like Hart Crane, he crowds image upon image to increase sensation and suggest new perspectives. But he does not share Eliot's disillusions or Crane's disorganization. There is constant control as well as positive belief in Gregory's poetry; his faith is a social faith. Plain statement and elliptical suggestion are employed to create characters and dramas of quiet violence. The intensity disturbs continuity, but (the poet might well insist) so does modern life; the tone is appropriately tough and complex and strictly contemporary. Gregory's "M'Phail," like Eliot's "Prufrock" and Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy," is a symbol of the lost man, the failure who escapes from the actual world into a dream-world of feeble excitement and false grandeur. The later poems round out the earlier verse and give it a growing design; they reflect the forces of the past focussed upon the present. Besides his poetry, Gregory has written Pilgrim of the Apocalypse (1933), an important critical study of D. H. Lawrence, his symbols and his significance. THEY FOUND HIM SITTING IN A CHAIR They found him sitting in a chair: continual and rigid ease poured downward through his lips and heart, entered the lungs and spread until paralysis possessed his knees. The evanescent liquid still ringing while friends and strangers pass. Lifelike, resembling what we were, erect, alert the sun-tanned head: polo or golf this afternoon? And night, the country club or bar? -drink down to end all poverty, two millions gone, and stir no more. Because I know his kind too well, but like a first shot heard in war. And not for him, nor you, nor me Even in death, my lips the same whisper at midnight through the door and through storm-breaking hemisphere, rise at that hour and hear my name. POEMS FOR MY DAUGHTER Tell her I love she will remember me always, for she is of my tissues made; she will remember these streets where the moon's shade falls and my shadow mingles with shadows sprung Tell her I love that I am neither in earth nor sky, stone nor cloud, but only this walled garden she knows well and which her body is. Her eyes alone shall make concealed where no man's eye finds me unless she says: He is my flesh and I am what he was. The return after VALEDICTION TO MY CONTEMPORARIES Entrain airport New York Chicago west seawind but no saltsea in this lake spray clear eyes and nostrils: drink out health: the sand Stop signals home again! Awake at morning, spring coiled in the body skylight and sun. Tilt the horizon down, ride windward through Wisconsin miles of corn, O Alma Mater on the hill! What green hills, Cicero, anchored within us rest, flower in sleep, Catullus, The University of Wisconsin: 1919 Here was the campus of our hearts, my friends, see what miraculous fruit its branches bear, See how the white dome trembles in the sun, |