sidney keyes in historical perspective Plucking the bitter-fruited orange Fame;
Longways of hopeful windows; the old year
Stretching its straitjacket of ice and crying
For us to rescue summer. All these images
Lay in that place.
Words fell between the picture
And its projection, as your face changed quickly.
Rilke a moment wandered between our eyes
Gazing in each, seeing in separation
A central unity: the whitestone angel standing
Between us irrefutably, teaching our world
Humility and peace. Our peace, our poem.^91This is an uneven work, in contrast to ‘William Wordsworth’, which seems to me
totallyau faitwith itself. Nonetheless, it possesses within its imperfection several
of the qualities to which I have previously pointed. The poem in fact ends (the
concluding seven lines) as if it were indeed a perfectly achieved thing: this is largely
due, as in poems noted in this discussion, to the intermingling of intensity and
sobriety that results from the rapid change of image ‘shots’ contained by Keyes’s
characteristically measured verse paragraphing. The flaws are merely local irritants
(why‘five-fingered hand of sense’? Surely the ‘five’ is redundant because everyone
knows about the five senses?), and are outweighed by the numerous felicities (‘Your
amazingeyes’,‘theoldyear|Stretchingitsstraitjacketofice’,‘Homelessandeagerfor
our saving friendship’). ‘Your amazing eyes’ is not a mere cliche of mid-twentieth- ́
century Petrarchism. Elsewhere in the poem it might have been: it is all a question of
careful placing. Coming as it does in the second line, the quality ofbeingamazing in
oneself infiltrates or diffuses into the rest of the poem, which is a poem of amazement
that anything can survive such deb ́ acles as the fall of France (‘Chartresˆ |Reeling with
insult’), the more intimate deb ́ acle of passionate, wholly unrequited love, and theˆ
petty inevitabilities and inadvertences of contingent circumstance (‘And there were
lives perversely otherwise|Than ours, yet like’). No one but a young maestro could
have placed the line ‘Homeless and eager for our saving friendship’: syntactically it
is the ‘foundling hours’ of shared experience that will not now take place which are
predicated by the phrase; in Keyes’s symbolic grammar it is the entire experience of
their close, frustrated encounter, it is themselves who are to be saved by friendship
amazingly won from rejection by an act of making. So that, finally, friendship in
separateness achieves the other separateness, the other finality, which is the poem.
To turn to further details of placement and cadence: since my discussion has
throughout remarked the presence of Rilke, we observe his presence in this poem
also; and perhaps an allusion to Morike—his novella ̈ Mozart on the Way to Prague.^92
(^91) Keyes, ‘For Milein, l.xii.41’, inCollected Poems(2002), 108–9.
(^92) Eduard Morike, ̈ Mozart on the Way to Prague, trans. Walter and Catherine Alison Phillips (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1947), 41–8, 73–9.