Реферат: Louis D Rubin On

fought for, and could die willingly for knowing it:

You know who have waited by the wall

The twilight certainty of an animal,

Those midnight restitutions of the blood

You know—the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze

Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,

The cold pool left by the mounting flood,

Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.

You who have waited for the angry resolution

Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,

You know the unimportant shrift of death

And praise the vision

And praise the arrogant circumstance

Of those who fall

Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision—

Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Times are not what they were, Tate’s Southerner at the gate realizes; it has become

almost impossible even to imagine such days:

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point

With troubled fingers to the silence which

Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

Even the title of the poem stems from the irony of the then and now; "Not only are

the meter and rhyme without fixed pattern," Tate wrote, "but in another feature

the poem is even further removed from Pindar than Abraham Cowley was: a purely subjective

meditation would not even in Cowley’s age have been called an ode. I suppose in so calling

it I intended an irony: the scene of the poem is not a public celebration, it is a lone

man by a gate."

from Rubin, Southern Renascence. Copyright ? 1953 by the Johns Hopkins UP.