our opening any long account with hope.

III

Of the seven original poems which occupy the first half of Near the Ocean, "Waking Early Sunday Morning" and "Forth of July in Maine," standing first, seem best. But they are all good. The reader of Lowell will recognize much familiar thematic material: New England, the sea, war, religious allusions, classical references, and the effect of technology in the large city. There are quite specific reminiscences (Compare "Forth of July" with "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," for example). Mr.Lowell's mastery of rhyme seems as vigorous as it was twenty years ago in Lord Weary's Castle; indeed, the collections in that book entitled "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket: and "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" may be profitably compared with "Near the Ocean" if the reader has the inclination. Lowell seems most natural, lucid, and powerful when writing of Maine in the first two poems. The other three are of New York: "The Opposite House" and "Central Park" are brief, clear, and properly depressing. But the final poem, itself called "Near the Ocean," although it boasts an impressive technical display of straight rhymes, off-rhymes, and sight rhymes, and some extremely forceful language, is loosely constructed and lacks the clarity of the other pieces. The police in the last stanza of "The Opposite House, the lion and the kitten in "Central Park," the end of "Fourth of July" set in the firelight in the dead of winter--these are all memorable moments in this collection,and by no means all of them. The short poem "For Theodore Roethke" is a moving testimonial, in which the sea is used in one more imaginative way by Lowell, while the sonnet "1958," an impressionistic series of recollections, seems poor if compared to "Water" the opening poem of For the Union Dead, and a simpler and more effective memory of lost love.

I hardly dare attempt a statement on the book's unity. Lowell says in his note that the theme connecting the translations in Rome, but that he does not quite understand how one couples Rome with the America of his own poems. I feel quite sure there is a unity, and that such a coupling can be made, but equally sure that it should be made in a suggestive way that remains open to modification. There are certain parallels between Juvenal-Lowell on Rome and Lowell on New York, for example. Consider the lines "Behind each bush perhaps a knife" ("Central Park") and "If you take a walk at night/ carry a little silver, be prepared/ to think each shadow hides a knife or spar" ("The Vanity of Human Wishes"). The more significant parallels with Juvenal, however, lie in the Maine poems, where the wish "to break loose" is in profound tension with the wish to return to "when the universe was young" (if one takes the context of breaking loose as implying movement into the future).

Juvenal wrote soon after the dark reign of the emperor Domitian, and the subject of his satires is the corruption in Rome of the last two decades of the first century. Consideration of man's folly in the things he prays for is his topic in "The Vanity of Human Wishes," and leads to the more positive question: what should man pray for? Lowell, obviously as disturbed as Juvenal about his age, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, asks a yet more basic question: can we, at this point, find it in us to pray at all? I return again to "Waking Early Sunday Morning," in which the narrator is summoned to church by electric bells to hear the hymns which "sign of peace and preach despair. "Decline and the brink of despair, commonly held by those who spent their youth in the shadows of Domitian and Hitler, are powerfully communicated in this fine stanza:

When will we see Him face to face? Each day He shines through darker glass.

In this small town where every thing is known, I see His vanishing emblems, His white spire and flagpole sticking out above the fog, like old white china doorknobs, sad, slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Sidney Nolan's drawings do not, in general, add much to this excellent book. Where the intent is light humor, they succeed modestly; but Lowell and Juvenal are similar in that they frequently intend to repel through the use of humor not light but grim, and Mr. Nolan's attempts to repel only amuse. But one buys the book to read Lowell, and what one reads is surely contemporary poetry of the first rank. After twenty years, this seems for the present generation closer to fact than opinion, though taste in succeeding ones will doubtless fluctuate. For the present. I must make the canned appeal to those faintly interested to go out and buy the book--if possible, today, April 21, as the celebration of an anniversary. Anyone wondering what Juvenal, Horace, Domitian and all the rest were doing on this date during their lifetimes could be reliably assured that they were celebrating the Parilia, the traditional birthday of the city of Rome. That was exactly 2,720 years ago