Thoughts On Rexroth — страница 2

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that the elements of his cubist verse (see "Prolegomenon to a Theodicy") "are as simple as the elementary shapes of a cubist painting and the total poem is as definite and apprehensible as the finished picture," it was the measured, syntactical line of "Floating" and "Delia" he was to develop and largely use from the thirties on. Even in the later poems in The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart, On Flower Wreath Hill, and The Silver Swan–so thoroughly influenced by Japanese and Chinese models (after Waley and Pound, Rexroth was the great bringer of East Asian poetry into our culture)–he maintains much the same voice and cadences and line of the earlier work. The simplicity of exact pronouncement may allow for particularly complex

thought. Precision of fact in observation, as well as in syntax or form, is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Rexroth’s crucial book-length poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn. That this poem is now so seldom read, even by Rexroth aficionados and practitioners of the craft of poetry, troubled Rexroth, and depressed him. For in The Dragon and the Unicorn we find the most complete formulation of his personal, mystical philosophy, the most extensive indictment of Western civilization (comparable to, if not as fiery and incantatory as "Thou Shalt Not Kill"), and perhaps the closest approximation to his speaking voice there is in his poetical works. (An Autobiographical Novel is the most perfect mirror to Rexroth’s spoken word, as it was dictated, and edited only enough

to get it past Doubleday’s libel lawyers.) Set as a running travelog of his year-long journey through Wales, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, and back to America, The Dragon and the Unicorn is a meditation on the nature of love, of time and knowledge, of will and the responsibilities of the self-defining individual, of community (the moral opposite of the collective, the State), and ethics. Juxtapositions are abrupt; the life of the traveler’s mind is pingponged against crisply drawn episodes on the road–the latter of which are in turn ribald, poignant, engaging, scientific, very opinionately lived moments. Together the contemplation and the travelog comprise what Rexroth himself has suggested is a Whitmanesque "interior autobiography." And nowhere in his work

is the dictum "Epistomology is moral" more intricately played out than this poem. However important The Dragon and the Unicorn may be for one hoping to gain some understanding of Rexroth’s general philosophy, there is little doubt that his reputation as a poet rests, at least for the present, more on his love and nature poems (too, on his translations from Chinese and Japanese which, for lack of space, I was unable to include in this selection). Clearly, he has written some of the most beautiful love poems in the century. His lyric celebrates not merely the disembodied metaphysic nor simply the corporeal erotic, but a synthetic and human whole, composed of both these elements. As a religious poet, Rexroth’s love poems are primarily of conjugal love: Let me celebrate

you. I Have never known anyone More beautiful than you. I Walking beside you, watching You move beside me, watching That still grace of hand and thigh. Watching your face change with words You do not say, watching your Solemn eyes as they turn to me, Or turn inward, full of knowing, Slow or quick, watching your full Lips part and smile or turn grave, Watching your narrow waist, your Proud buttocks in their grace . . . Fundamentally sacramental, seldom does the poet’s contemplation of his love of his wife distinguish between body and soul. In the above passage from "A Dialogue of Love" (written for Rexroth’s third wife, Marthe) the usual dichotomy between the observing mind and the tactile flesh is consciously played down: each reflects the other. In an earlier poem,

"Between Myself and Death," the dichotomy is altogether erased: It is wonderful to watch you, A living woman in a room Full of frantic sterile people, And think of your arching buttocks Under your velvet evening dress, And the beautiful fire spreading From your sex, burning flesh and bone, The unbelievably complex Tissues of your brain all alive Under your coiling, splendid hair. ——— I like to think of you naked. I put your naked body Between myself alone and death. It is the most original and persuasive synthesis of transcendent metaphysical and erotic verse written by an American poet this century. From the Introduction to Rexroth’s Selected Poems, ed. Bradford Morrow (New Directions, 1984). Copyright ? 1984 by Bradford Morrow.