Modern American Poetry

(^12) Harold Bloom
are attending a “unison and a dance.” This “death’s festival”—
memento moriand celebration of the “Undying”—evades neither
the mystery of transience nor that of organic continuance,
though neither can be “parsed” by the analytical mind.... In this
composed testament of acceptance, Williams’s saxifrage
(“through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones”)
quietly does its work.... Not since Wordsworth has this natural
piety been rendered so freshly and poignantly.
I would not wish to quarrel with Whitaker’s judgment, yet there is very
little Wordsworth and (inevitably) much Whitman and considerable Keats in
“A Unison.” Indeed; the poem opens with what must be called an echo from
Whitman, in what I assume was a controlled allusion:
The grass is very green, my friend,
And tousled, like the head of—
your grandson, yes?
We hear one of the uncanniest passages in Whitman, from “Song of
Myself” 6:
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Whitman’s great fantasia answers a child’s question: “What is the grass?”
As an Epicurean materialist, Whitman believed that the what was
unknowable, but his remarkable troping on the grass takes a grand turn after
his Homeric line: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of
graves.” Williams simply borrows the trope, and even his “very green”
merely follows Whitman’s hint that a “very green” becomes a “very dark”
color, in the shadow of mortality. “A Unison” insists upon
—what cannot be escaped: the
mountain riding the afternoon as
it does, the grass matted green,
green underfoot and the air—
rotten wood. Hear! Hear them!
the Undying. The hill slopes away,
then rises in the middleground,