Books: A Matter of Arrangement

A STONE, A LEAF, A DOOR—Thomas Wolfe—Scribner ($2.50).

Readers of the late Novelist Thomas Wolfe’s prose have sometimes felt that they were reading poetry. Sergeant John S. Barnes has tried to prove it by ar ranging passages from Wolfe’s books as verse.

Wolfe’s crowded and tumultuous sen tences shape themselves naturally into rhapsodic verses. Most ambitious poem in the collection is the eleven-page This Is Man, a portrait of the human creature whom “it is impossible to scorn.” More winning are the lyrics about the seasons and the weather and their way with man on the earth he loves.

Wolfe’s familiar voice as a novelist is most readily recognized in the title poem : . . . A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; Of a stone, a leaf, a door.

And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile.

In her dark womb We did not know our mother’s face; From the prison of her flesh we have come Into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison Of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart?

Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss in the hot mazes, lost, Among the bright stars On this most weary unbright cinder, lost ! Remembering speechlessly We seek the great forgotten language, The lost lane-end into heaven, A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.