Poetry

RUINS AND VISIONS--Stephen Spender --Random House ($2).

Stephen Spender is the youngest member of the famed Oxford poetical quadrum virate of Spender, Auden, Lewis & MacNeice. For more than a decade these prestige-puffed young Lefties have been writing about their life and times with the authority of youth and political desperation. Most of them have had a high old time at it. But the quadrumvir who seems to have enjoyed himself least and to have done his work most painstakingly is Poet Spender.

Spender, in 1942, is a poetical miniature of the English literary Left--a small man wearing a large suit of clothes. He subscribes to the great English poetic tradition that a poet is a being superior to his fellows in wisdom, human tenderness, beauty of perception, the power of inspiring in others a love of the good. To him the maintenance of this tradition is a spiritual necessity. But also he is bound by the need to live the life of a wide-awake modern man. Spender tries hard to reconcile these two modes of life. His failure is an enervating spectacle and also, in a small way, a tragic one.

Not all of the lyrics in Ruins and Visions are building stones for a reader's wailing wall. Scattered among these poems are lines not easy to forget. But there are more like this:

Why cannot the one good

Benevolent feasible

Final dove descend?

And the wheat be divided?

And the soldiers sent home?

And the barriers torn down?

And the enemies forgiven? . . .

Because the conqueror

Is an instrument of power,

With merciless heart hammered

Out of former fear. . . .

For the world is the world

And not the slain

Nor the slayer, forgive,

Nor do wild shores

Of passionate histories

Close on endless love;

Though hidden under seas

Of chafing despair,

Love's need does not cease.

This paradoxical pronouncement that love & hate are coeternal is the profoundest wisdom that Spender has to offer--half a lifetime after he, a sensitive rebel, repudiated the numb world of 20th-Century English idealism to look for new answers to life & death.

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