STEPHEN VINCENT BENET: BALLADIST

We are convinced. Mr. Benet breathes up to the ballad; that is his essential lung-power. In the ballad, with its burthen and repetend its flash and glitter and panoply of words, its haunting tonalities, our poet is peculiarly happy. Not that we deny his virtuosity. Mr. Benet can turn from Two Visions of Helen to Italy of the 16th century, hover for a beautiful moment on the Iseult legend, and bob up at 8.30 A. M. on 32nd street all in the space of 2 hours and 97 pages! But and we risk monotony the ballad is his measure.

In the poems on Helen of Troy (to whose tragedy Mr. Benet adds a tender episode), there are choruses comparable for phrase and lilt and a certain lyrical iridescence to Swinburne's "Atalanta." Where Swinburne chimes fragile silver, Mr. Benet hammers out hard steel. He revels in the resonant and triumphant metres which go ringing at full gallop as of horses who "dance . . . to the music their own hoofs make":

The centaurs awoke! They aroused from their beds of pine,

Their long flanks hoary with dew, and their eyes, deep-drowned

In the primal slumber of stones, stirred bright to the shine!

And they stamped with their hooves and their gallop abased the ground!

And this implies quite inevitably another tangent of contact between Mr. Benet and Swinburne, namely Mr. Benet's delight in taming words, in spurring and curvetting them to his desire. It is the sheer zest of youth, for Mr. Benet is young.

New words are my desire, new verbs to scan...

And I have found redemption and surcease

In Babylonian nouns like bulls asleep.

It is the same hey-day in the blood which becomes intoxicated with a single plangent and stalwart line and clings there, forgetful of all else:

Dear ruffians dicing, long beneath blurred candles.

Romance and thunder and the Spanish Main.

Some lines are breathlessly delicate:

She was lily and pale as a sleeping moth;

Some cut us with their sharp and chiselled beauty:

Colder than leopard's eyes the are

Where all the freezing stars go round.

Black wind runs trofting to the dark,

Striking cold hoofs on the cold ground.

And lo! We have come round to the ballad. We cannot, and do not wish to, escape. Mr. Benet may brood over the sonnet (there are 16 in the book), but it will only flicker; it will not shine. For the sonnet's Procrustean tyranny will brook no revolt: the breather of cadences is either stretched or beheaded--both equally painful:

And steadfast muscles draw my sonnet up

To the firm iron of the fourteenth line. An you please, Mr. Benet, no more of this. "Heavens and Earth!" "And shall I couple hell?" Sing us a thousand ballads! Drink,

drink the ale of Tartary

And eat the spice of Trebizond!