Books: Light Without Heat

TALIFER—Edwin Arlington Robinson— Macmillan ($1.75).

From his little cabin studio at Peterboro, N. H.’s artistic MacDowell Colony, Edwin Arlington Robinson, dean of U. S. poets, has dispatched another of his quiet psychological narratives. Talifer, fitting with predictable neatness into its appropriate place in the Robinson canon, adds little, detracts not at all, from the reputation its author’s earlier books have won him. Repeating in tempo and style its immediate predecessors, it marks another notch in his descent into poetic old age.

Aristocratic Samuel Talifer, an admiral At least, if mot a monarch in appearance, returned after ten years’ absence to his native village, whose obvious though unstated locale is New England. There he met and fell in love with Althea. Disturbingly before their marriage he also met Karen, a heaven-wrought sheath

Of ice and intellect and indifference, whose favorite reading in a hot New England summer is Hermes Trismegistus and Apollonius Rhodius. In her Talifer imagined he saw an ideal of Peace, imagined he preferred it to the earthier happiness Althea offered him. Abruptly, after breaking with Althea to marry Karen, he was disillusioned, abruptly returned to his first love.

The bare outlines of his story Poet Robinson fills in not with detailed narration but with long conversations. Anxious to achieve a realistic cadence, he has on occasion too willingly sacrificed poetry to do so. The fact that a line like:

With the whole paraphernalia of refreshment

is printed as blank verse is no reason for thinking that it actually is blank verse. Sometimes this casual prosiness is unintentionally comic, as when he makes a minor character think of Karen as

The loveliest biological achievement

That his prehensile eyes had yet approved. . . .

Handled by a poet less gifted with quiet discernment and a pithy irony which makes extended comment unnecessary, Talifer would be quite empty of significance. But Robinson, though his lines now lack poetic fire, retains a sure and practised technique, a shrewd discernment that radiates light if not heat.