Unpredictable Lute

BURNING CITY--Stephen Vincent Benet --Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

In the hierarchy of contemporary U. S. poets, Stephen Vincent Benet stands somewhat ambiguously as a comparatively young (37) singer whose heavily emotional approach to national concerns is slightly preWar, like his verse forms. A singularly unpredictable performer, he has been able to turn from so broad a project as his John Brown's Body to slapdash popular verses in the worst tradition of James Whitcomb Riley. In Burning City the contradictory aspects of his talent are laid out as if for analysis and dissection.

Most flattering example from the present collection deals with the four seasons of New York, Notes to Be Left in a Cornerstone. To the questioning spirit of the future the poet says that maps, photographs and statistics cannot describe the "different beast" of New York, the city that awakened in the autumn, when "the shops were slices of honeycomb full of honey" and when "the boys came from far places with cardboard suitcases." He describes the winters filled with memories of bad colds, of policemen with faces like blue meat, of "overcoatless men;" the brief spring, the hot summers when the poor lay out on fire-escapes "and the child cried thinly and endlessly." But Poet Benet admits he cannot explain the city or its society to future cornerstone riflers, and to serious readers his apostrophe may sound a little hollow:

Sea-haunted, river emblemed, o the gray

Water at ends of streets and the boats hooting!

The unbelievable, new, bright, girl moon!

In his Ode to Walt Whitman, Poet Benet experiences further difficulty explaining the present to the questioning spirit from the past. When Whitman asks, "Is it well with these States?" the poet's troubled answer is:

They burn the grain in the furnace while men go hungry.

cists enters the novel. Mary's husband, turning from a conservative to a radical under the pressure of economic distress, gets into a dispute over the tithe, barricades his house, digs a trench to prevent the tithe-collector from taking away his stock. Shots are fired, mysterious figures slink through the fog, the fascists camp on the farm to protect it from the police. During this imbroglio, Mary's high-minded lover is pushed off a wagon by a policeman. This dislodges two pieces of shrapnel left in his brain since the War, with the result that he goes blind. Mary thereupon regrets her previous highmindedness, offers herself to her lover, but his regard for her husband has deepened with his loss of sight, and it is his turn to do the rejecting. Mary, who expected nothing in the first place, does not seem particularly disappointed.

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