Pharaetra

The Lowellian Apollo has packed some charming sagittae into his current Pharaetra. Aegis-bearers John Berendt and Jeremy Johnston have avoided the inept high seriousness which has so often encumbered the Lowell House poetry magazine, and have come up with a group of pieces composed by scers, whose auburn hair Melpomene herself has no doubt bound with the fragrant laurel.

Perhaps the most fragrant laurel of all belongs to Mr. Johnston himself, whose poems have appeared all too infrequently in Cambridge publications. It would be folly to attempt to describe the delicacies of Mr. Johnston's style, his skill in blank verse, his felicity of rhyme; I must pretermit all this, even decline to mention the phrasing of his narrative, the ingenuity of his conceit. I cannot, however, refrain from remarking with highest approbation--upon his obvious familiarity with the Lesser Celandine, a flower whose possibilities have never been adequately explored; and his accurate and steadfast belief in Nymphs and Satyrs, the old and true deities, whose existence has in no way been refuted by the cults of various recent pretenders.

Among the offerings which might (with some in accuracy) be termed entirely serious, John C. Holden's Memento Mori is the most substantial. Despite a not entirely satisfactory central metaphor ("My life's a sheet of paber filled with holes./People, punched away by antic death...") and some few rough spots, Memento Mori, which won the Hatch Prize this year, is a fine piece. Mr. Holden succeeds in encasing a particularly unwieldly sentiment in a tight and carefully plotted structure. The skillful shifting of the rhyme scheme, and its complete abandonment at one point, reinforce the progression of Mr. Holden's ideas; and the entire poem (to commit sacrilege upon a hallowed text) is an admirable illustration of how a banal thought may be garnished with the irregular combinations of fanciful invention, until the product may be read with greatest pleasures of sudden wonder.

Among the other delights of the current Pharaetra, Mr. Mason Dixon Harris's Dawn on Land and Sea displays the control and vividness which has marked his recent work; Mr. David Landon plays with quickly changing metaphors; Mr. John Berendt parodies Vachel Lindsay, with particularly ironic intent; Mr. Arthur Levin parodies Mr. Alexander Pope, who tends to resist parody pretty well.

And, of course, one must not fail to mention the exhilarating drawings of M.K. Frith, another obvious believer in Nymphs and Satyrs, whose touching study of Mason Dixon Harris on the back page of the issue may well become one of the great allegories of our time.