Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 131

nostalgia. The modulation from statement to prophecy is made so
unobtrusively that we scarcely notice it until it has happened:

She gives transparence. But she has grown old.

The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.

The house will crumble and the books will burn.

These four symmetrical lines are so tonelessly uttered that the fourth seems
as unarguable, as much a natural fact, as the preceding three. But the effect
of the intensification into prophecy is to send the mind rapidly back to the
lulling present of the unsuspecting family:

They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,

Together, all together.

The prophecy reappears, but in a softened rephrasing, first in the deceptive
appearance of the approaching consuming fire:

Boreal night

Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep

And as they say good-night, good-night.

And the inevitable extinction of the family is announced in a sinister but
understated mention of the extinguished lights in the bedchambers, lit now
only by the flaring auroras outside:
Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

Finally, though, these mitigations and evasions give way to the peremptory doom:

The wind will spread its windy grandeurs round

And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.

The wind will command them with invincible sound.