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Midsummer" is an uncanny trance-like monolog, but what is unsaid is envisioned in any woman's universe; "The White Dress" is an extraordinary evocation, the growth of a symbol from haunting beauty to horrible possession; "The Lovers" is, in skillful repetitions and contrapuntal images, one of the most musical lovepoems of our time. Even the "classical" poems, such as the "Head of Medusa,” bring full life to mythological figures, not only reanimating a legend but creating a new and complex character.

There is in this poetry a combination which no contemporary has quite achieved: a fusion of definite picture and indefinite symbolism, of word-music and parable. Experience is transmuted, resolved, and transcended; "The Daisy" is only one example of subtlety resolved into simplicity. The lyrical impulse is extended in individualized images and personal landscapes; it searches but it never forgets to sing. If the tone is sometimes faraway, it is because this poet is occupied with a sense of timelessness.

Hers is an art of vivid condensation, of wide allusions in compact phrases: "the swan-feathered snow," "the heart's best weather," "the grass blade's thin precision," "the lip-red poppy scenting earth with sleep," "the intricate unholiness. of pain." Superficially these lyrics may seem to be pastoral-historical-the tradition of Marvell, Waller, and Clare-but the synthesis is as remarkable as it is new: a combination of shining observation and shadowed allegory. In spirit as well as substance this verse has a form of its own, a shape delicate and pure. But it is not the cold purity of crystal. It is the purity of quiet but intensely burning flame.

THE DAISY

Having so rich a treasury, so fine a hoard
Of beauty water-bright before my eyes,

I plucked the daisy only, simple and white

In its fringed frock and brooch of innocent gold.

So is all equilibrium restored:

I leave the noontide wealth of richer bloom
To the destroyer, the impatient ravisher,
The intemperate bee, the immoderate bird.

Of all this beauty felt and seen and heard
I can be frugal and devout and plain,
Deprived so long of light and air and grass,
The shyest flower is sweetest to uncover.

How poor I was: and yet no richer lover
Discovered joy so deep in earth and water;
And in the air that fades from blue to pearl,
And in a flower white-frocked like my small daughter.

THE LOVERS

My glittering sky, high, clear, profound,

Be thou my Alps, I'll be thy summer.

I'll be thy summer and the ground

Where all thy garlands, all thy honors found
In the sky's mirror, fire and dew contend,
Which shall excel, which shall transcend.

Be thou my mountain heights, I'll be the plain,
Warm, simple, sweet, complaisant to the rain,
Complaisant to the rain and wind, the common day.
I'll be the daisy field where happy children play,
Where happy children play, where the world's voice is heard
In a tree, in the grass, in the storm, in a bird.

Be thou the diamond water-crisp, and I the fire
Rosy and quick within the ruby's flame,
Within the ruby's flame inscribe my name
Sensitive on the spirit's delicate wire,

Send occult messages no human tongue can say.
Be thou the night, I'll be the day.

I'll be the day, so fresh, so morning bright,
And thy youth's dawning and the fields of light,
The fields of light that change dark to bright.
Thou my tranquillity, I thy delight,
Thou the thin light of opals on my wrist

And I the evening tinted heaven brooding amethyst.

Be thou the waterbrook and I the hart
Drinking in coolness from rain moistened heat,
Drinking in coolness where the willows part,

And where the willows part, two diverse shadows meet.
Be thou the sheltered pool, and I the busy street

And we the shades that one another greet.

Change then forever, be forever the same,

Who have one road, one destiny, one name,

One destiny, one name, jewel, dew, fire (never the same),
The mountain and the river, city and plain.

Separate, distinct, divided, parted, meeting ever
What the eye loses, let the heart recover.

THE WHITE DRESS

Imperceptively the world became haunted by her white dress.
Walking in forest or garden, he would start to see,
Her flying form; sudden, swift, brief as a caress
The flash of her white dress against a darkening tree.

And with forced unconcern, withheld desire, and pain
He beheld her at night; and when sleepless in his bed,
Her light footfalls seemed loud as cymbals; deep as his disdain,
Her whiteness entered his heart, flowed through from feet to head.

Or it was her face at a window, her swift knock at the door,

Then she appeared in her white dress, her face as white as her gown;

Like snow in midsummer she came and left the rich day poor;

And the sun chilled and grew higher, remote, and the moon slipped down.

So the years passed; more fierce in pursuit her image grew;

She became the dream abjured, the ill uncured, the deed undone,

The life one never lived, the answer one never knew,

Till the white shadow swayed the moon, stayed the expiring sun,

Until at his life's end, the shadow of the white face, the white dress
Became his inmost thought, his private wound, the word unspoken,
All that he cherished in failure, all that had failed his success;
She became the crystal orb, half-seen, untouched, unbroken.

There on his death bed, kneeling at the bed's foot, he trembling saw,
The image of the Mother-Goddess, enormous, archaic, cruel,
Overpowering the universe, creating her own inexorable law,
Molded of stone, but her fire and ice flooded the room like a pool.

And she was the shadow in the white dress, no longer slight and flying,
But solid as death. Her cold, firm, downward look,

Brought close to the dissolving mind the marvellous act of dying,
And on her lap, the clasped, closed, iron book.

HEAD OF MEDUSA

How long she waited for her executioner!

She who froze life to stone, whose hissing hair
Once grew as waved and flowing as the sea,

Ash-damp and dreadful now. The fabulous mystery, the shame,
Forever in that cave where man nor beast came

Came and returned to life; so great the curse
Of the invulnerable enemy whose eyes immerse
Medusa's soul in this foul universe,

Turns her warm body passionate, fleshed with fire,
Into this loathsome thing no men desire.

Cast in the final loneliness she must lie
Knowing that all who look on her will die
(The savage sorrow frozen in her sigh)
Even as she meets the look of fear and hate.
Their blood dries and their flesh must expiate.

But now her Perseus comes, foe or deliverer?

Bringing the welcome end. For whom her serpents stir,
Brute force and animal terror, the soul's tormentor
Subside; low-water calm, slow, unperceptively
Comes he who sets her free.

And now the end nears. Through steelpoint warm blood

Shall flow in purification. Her world made clean and good, Through pain the Immortal's hatred is withstood.

Even now in the gold shield

One faces her, his life-blood uncongealed,

Prepares for the quick stroke that sets her free
From the cold terror in all eyes that see.
Even now the slayer's hand displays the mystery
That once vainglorious and guilty head,
Emptied of all its sorrow and its dread!

WOMAN AT THE PIANO

Rippling in the ocean of that darkening room,
The music poured from the thin hands, widening, gathering
The floods of descending night; flying from the keys
The sound of memory, then the woman singing
Vibrant and full, the resonant echoes scattered
Into a stranger's language, into a foreign country.

The rococo clock on the mantel strikes out its chimes
The night wind sighing through the open windows,
Sends in its signals, wishes, memories.

The withdrawn room grows immense with hallucination
Clear woman's voice, long fingers whitely straying
Over the speaking keys do you hear the answer?

Will the male voice answer? see stirring through the walls
Behind the rustling curtains in the declining light
How another voice still silent seems to tremble.

Patience is all. Unloved, unlovable, lonely,

It sits on the neglected sofa, watches the fingers
Draw out the significant music, hears the finale
Shatter the torpor of the dying room.

Now the trees through open windows aspire and flame
Now there are footsteps, echoes, reveries

Now two voices sound in the room where only one

Wove intricate sweetness from the simple keys.
Two voices ring in the dawn, the morning enters.

THE TEMPEST

As in a Watteau fete of rose and silver blue,
The intense colors lift the dreamy world

Into a sharper vision than it knew,

The graceful figures vast in miniature.

And deepens overhead the dainty, sweeping azure.

So in the cold and limpid morning air,

When but a hint of sun was felt, we breathed the storm

Companioned by June light. It tinged the warm,
Half-sleeping flowers. Unseen, but everywhere
We felt the tempest's uncreated form,

Gathering its might, its bright and nervous flare.

See how its silver hand disturbs the clouds
And the soul's solitude in anger wakes

The waving revery of grass, and whispering shakes
The airy heavens into the drifting lakes,

While rain falls gently from the savage eyes.

And silken-sharp the dazzling thunder falls
Upon the startled land. The rising, falling dart
Sudden and piercing on the summer's heart;
And while from tree to tree the voice of fire calls

The unleashed tempest shakes the garden walls,

Ο

Ogden Nash

GDEN NASH was born August 6, 1903, in Rye, New York, of a distinguished and seemingly ubiquitous family. He claims to have had ten thousand cousins in North Carolina; his great-great-grandfather was Revolutionary Governor of the state, and the latter's brother, General Francis Nash, gave his name to Nashville, Tennessee. Ogden Nash spent a year at St. George's School in Rhode Island, where, he says, he lost his entire nervous system carving lamb for a table of fourteenyear-olds. He entered Harvard in the class of 1924, but left after one year.

To continue his biography in his own words: "Came to New York to make my fortune as a bond salesman; in two years I sold one bond-to my godmother. However, I saw a lot of good movies. Next went to work writing car cards. After two years of that I landed in the advertising department of Doubleday. That was 1925, and I doubledayed until 1931." After 1931, Nash engaged in a succession of varied activities: he was on the staff of The New Yorker; became associated with two publishing firms; married and lived in Baltimore; had two daughters and moved to Hollywood, where he wrote or rewrote-scenarios.

Nash's liveliest effects are in Free Wheeling (1931), The Bad Parent's Garden of Verse (1936), and I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1938), but all his volumes are characterized by rollicking spirits, easy satire, and a slightly insane manner. The style is bantering, deceptively haphazard, but the end is often a kind of social criticism. For most readers, however, Nash's charm lies in his irresponsible absurdities, in the impudent rhymes which do not quite rhyme, in his way of giving a new twist to an old subject. He can be surprisingly shrewd and nonsensical at the same time.

The Face Is Familiar (1940) contains two hundred eighty poems selected from

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