THE POSTMAN'S BELL IS ANSWERED EVERYWHERE God and the devil in these letters, stored in tin trunks, tossed in wastebaskets, or ticketed away in office files: love, hate, and business, mimeograph sheets, circulars, bills of lading, official communiqués, accounts rendered. Even the anonymous letter says, Do not forget. And in that long list, Dean Swift to Stella, Walpole to Hannah More, Carlyle to Jane and what were Caesar's "Gallic Wars" other than letters of credit for future empire? Do not forget me. As the bell rings, here is the morning paper and more letters, the post date 10 P.M. "It is an effort for me to write; I have grown older. I have two daughters and a son, and business prospers, but my hair is white; why can't we meet for lunch? It has been a long time since we met; I doubt if you would know me if you glanced quickly at my overcoat and hat, and saw them vanish Do not forget. . . . “Oh, you must not forget you held me in your arms while the small room trembled in darkness; do you recall the slender, violet light between the trees next morning through the park? Since I'm a woman, how can I unlearn the arts of love within single hour, how can I close my eyes before a mirror, believe I am not wanted, that hands, lips, breast are merely deeper shadows behind the door where all is dark? ...” Or, "Forgive me if I intrude; the dream I had Or, "I alone am responsible for my own death." Or, to accept your invitation." Or, "Remember that evening at the Savoy-Plaza?" Or, “It was I who saw the fall of France." As letters are put aside, another bell rings in another day; it is, perhaps, not too late to remember the words that leave us naked in their sight, the warning, "You have not forgotten me; these lines were written by an unseen hand twelve hours ago. Do not reply at this address; these are the last words I shall write." THIS IS THE PLACE TO WAIT (from "The Passion of M'Phail") When you are caught breathless in an empty station and silence tells you that the train is gone, as though it were something for which you alone were not prepared and yet was here and could not be denied; when you whisper, Why was I late, what have I done?, you know the waiting hour is at your side. If the time becomes your own, you need not fear it; if you can tell yourself the hour is not the thing that takes you when you sit staring through clinic waiting-room white walls into the blank blue northern sky frozen a quarter-mile above the street, and you are held there by your veins and nerves spreading and grasping as a grapevine curves through the arms and back of an enamelled iron riverside park seat, you need not think, Why must I wait until the doctors say: "We have come to lock you up. It's the psychology of things that has got you down; if you complain, we shall take care of you until you know at last you can't escape. the dream of a child kept after school, made to write a hundred times what three times seven means, Is your dream while in your sleep, before you get the answer, the blackness fills and swells with pictures of Technicolor inkstain butterflies? in a bonfire? Are these the spines of ancient caterpillars? Is that ink blot a tiger Is this the shadow of a wildwood, leaping deer? And in that quiet, lost in space, almost remember knowing you could not touch her, or dare to still the floating, flawless motion It is then you tell yourself, Everything I live for is not quite lost. Even if you've waited someplace far too long, if you can't call it peace, you call it rest; if you can't call it luck, you call it fate; you then know that when anything goes wrong, perhaps it also happened in the past. You light a cigarette, you carefully blow out the match. You know again you have to wait. Malcolm Cowley ALCOLM COWLEY was born August 24, 1898, at Belsano in the valley between M Laurel Hill and Chestnut Ridge, Pennsylvania. He was educated in the Pittsburgh public schools, at Harvard University, and the University of Montpellier. After going abroad he became identified for a while with the "left wing" group, helped edit "Secession," and contributed sporadically to the less popular magazines. Later he became one of the editors of The New Republic. Unrecognized as a creator, he became known for his translations from the French, and received especial praise for his version of Paul Valéry's Variety and Maurice Barrés' The Sacred Hill. It was not until his thirty-first year that he received serious appraisal as a critic and as an author of original gifts. Blue Juniata (1929) traces, more or less chronologically, the genesis and growth of a poet. It begins in Cowley's west-central Pennsylvania and accompanies him on a fancied escape to Greenwich Village, through a further retreat (this time to Europe during the Valuta years of 1920-1924), a revulsion from self-imposed exile, to the final return. It has, therefore, the round development characteristic of the novel, a continuity and expansion one seldom finds in a book of poems. The first and, in many ways, the best section is sensitive and even lyrical; the second records that sentimental attachment to the sordid which, appropriate to youth, is a feverish and inverted nostalgia; the third registers a natural though somewhat elegant scorn for the Valutaschweine and the unrealities of a life which "ceased to have any values, only prices"; the fourth is a mixed paean and protest, a reaction to the speeded-up, machine-jazz-driven, overstimulated metropolis of "lasting impermanences"; the fifth and concluding section is the coda, self-described by its subtitle "Old Melodies: Love and Death." Here is the material for a searching work and, even in the most experimental pages, there is nothing superficial about Cowley. But, except in the first section and parts of the last, Cowley penetrates fewer surfaces than he leaves undisturbed. This is chiefly due to a method which is disruptive and to an idiom which is staccato and often feverish. Cowley himself is quick to forestall his critics, saying in one instance, "I have ceased to value many of these poems; their emotions and their technique are too impermanent," and in another, "Our writings . . . had other qualities that were more questionable-a sort of crooked sentiment, a self-protective smirk." Much of this is the poetry of adolescence, but the adolescent who was responsible for "Kelly's Barroom," "Nocturne," and "Free Clinic" could turn, a few years later, to expression as ripe as "Three Hills" and as simple-startling as "Two Swans." The title-poem, "Mine No. 6" and "The Farm Died," are further advances. They mark, with increasing confidence, the poet's attempt to record the conflict be tween time and timelessness, an accomplishment emphasized by the double sonnet "Winter." BLUE JUNIATA Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here there is no house at all Only the bones of a house, a door, a crooked chimney, a railroad thirty yards from the empty door. I heard a railroad section-man playing on a jew's-harp, Where is now that merry party I remember long ago? Nelly was a lady . . . twice . . . Old Black Joe, ... as if he laid a hand upon my shoulder, |