"If Autumn Ended . . ."

ACTFIVE AND OTHER POEMS (63 pp.)

Archibald MacLeish--Random House ($2.50).

Act five, the title poem of this book, is mainly a befuddled piece of pseudo-Stoic claptrap, to be read in sorrow by all who admire the author. Its burden is that God and King are gone, even Man is a little shopworn, but the "human perishable heart" remains as the hero of the future, since there is

Some resolution to be dutiful and good Owed by the lost child to the dreadful wood . . .

This treasure of a message, pried up after many heaves of grandiloquent rhetoric, might better have been left buried. But among the shorter lyrics that follow it are several which may give the reader an extraordinary sense ot pleasure. For, slight though they are, they announce the survival of one of the finest of American lyric talents.

For a decade or more that survival has been in doubt--and plenty of literary buzzards have circled above the place of apparent extinction. Archibald MacLeish, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a strong and gorgeous narrative poem on the conquest of Mexico (Conquistador), began, in the middle '30s, to write poetic manifestoes of state in which the oratorical interest outgrew the poetic. Moreover, both kinds of interest deteriorated, reaching a nadir in a thin book of thin versified prattle called America Was Promises, in 1939. In that year MacLeish had accepted the first of a series of public offices: that of Librarian of Congress. He also became successively head of the Office of Facts and Figures, assistant director of OWL Assistant Secretary of State, and deputy chairman of the U.S. delegation to UNESCO in Paris. It looked as if MacLeish were through as a working poet (he did not deny it) and had become a public man.

Crocodile tears were shed over this by people who had not sense enough to know that a man may honorably change his vocation, and by others unwilling to see that in doing jobs for his country, MacLeish was expressing in a different way the love of it that had given life to his best poems. Of the Indian chief Crazy Horse, victor over Custer, he had written:

Do you ask why he should fight? It was

his country: My God should he not fight? It was

his ...

And the same held for Archibald MacLeish, a boy who grew up on Lake Michigan, who was a captain of field artillery in France in 1918, who had memorably and simply envisioned his countrymen living

On the half earth, on the open curve of a continent.

Sea is divided from sea by the day-fall.

The dawn

Rides the low east with us many hours;

First are the capes, then are the shorelands, now

The blue Appalachians faint at the day rise ;

The willows shudder with light on the long Ohio . . .

Serious critics, nevertheless, were entitled to mourn the descent of MacLeish's style from such elevation to the vague patriotic fretting and bad verse that affairs of state seemed to stimulate in him.

MacLeish's job with UNESCO ended last year and he retired, at 55, to the life of "a private citizen and a practicing poet." The results, so far as verse is concerned, are certainly minor, still echoing the big, pretentiously philosophical tones for which his poetic equipment is essentially unsuited, but here & there MacLeish is at home again with the private emotions that he can make ring true. Chief among such emotions is something that some synthetically tough "intellectuals" have decried as nostalgia, as if the muses were not forever daughters of memory, or as if there were something necessarily weak about missing other times, places, or people:

If the autumn would End! If the sweet season, The late light in the tall trees would End! If the fragrance, the odor of Fallen apples, dust on the road, Water somewhere near, the scent of Water touching me; if this would end I could endure the absence in the night, The hands beyond the reach of bands, the name Called out and never answered with my name: The image seen but never seen with sight. I could endure this all If autumn ended and the cold light came.

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