O too dull brain, O unperceiving
nerves
That cannot sense what so torments
my soul,
But like torn trees, when deep
Novembers roll
Tragic with mighty winds and
vaulting curves
Of sorrowful vast sound, and light
that swerves
In blown and tossing eddies, branch
and bole
Shudder and gesture with a
grotesque dole,
A grief that misconceives the grief
it serves,
O too dull brain,—with some more
subtle sense
I know you here within the
lightless room
Reaching your hand to me, and my
faint eyes
See only darkness and the night’s
expanse,
And horribly, within the listening
gloom,
My voice comes back, still eager
with surprise.
Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Sonnet”
was collected in The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company,
1924). About MacLeish’s poetic work, Grover Smith, a noted scholar of T. S.
Eliot and professor emeritus at Duke University, wrote in his biography
Archibald MacLeish, “Between 1917 and 1924 MacLeish’s style acquired the
features of its maturity—conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphysical
strategies of argument; composed and intense implications—all of these owing
much, though quite certainly not everything, to Eliot’s example. [...]
MacLeish’s poetry, for the most part, is not introspective, and this is why
indeed no persona is wanted. According to its own purposes, its diminution of
the persona is a strength: by this means it turns the reader away from the
endless labyrinths of subjective illusion and irony, the ‘echoing vault’ of the
poetic self, and invites him to contemplate the phenomenal world. It does not
vocalize that self: it can and often does fabricate a kind of disembodied speech,
or speech whose origin need not be known.”
Archibald MacLeish, born in
Glencoe, Illinois, on May 7, 1892, was a writer, Modernist poet, and lawyer. He
authored several books, including his epic poem Conquistador (Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1932) which won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He served as a Chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets from 1946 to 1949. MacLeish died on April 20,
1982, in Boston.