Ruins and Visions

THE outstanding quality of Spender’s poetry is complete sincerity. He never wavers in fidelity to the truth of his own experience and he has a faculty of precise, ultrasensitive psychic notation which gives a keen reality to his vision. But that experience and vision, in this volume, are desolate enough. His earlier poetry, written within the framework of his communist faith, and seen at its best in “I think continually upon those that are truly great,’ presented convictions which gave its delicacy fiber and strength; but these poems, written out of the loneliness of lost love, are oppressive in their monotony of doom and gloom. He is haunted by “ the inconsolable cry of lost humanity,” “the senseless drone of the dull machines,” “the groaning of wasted lives,” and his own “territories of fear”; while he looks, with a mixture of attraction and repulsion, at those who find life simpler and easier, “who climb the dawn with such flexible knees,” who knock and enter. Pity for the plight of humanity is his strongest emotion, and his best poems are those like “An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum” or “Ultima Ratio Regum,” with its description of the boy killed in the Spanish war, and its moving conclusion:—

Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive trees, O world, O death?

But his verse lacks vigor. The absence of rhyme seems symbolic of his failure to reach conclusions, to see his experience in any framework of a larger reality, and the faint rhythms and careful phrasing become monotonous.

E.D.