Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 89

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ment from "Eden to the New Jerusalem."
The glories and crimes, the highest accom-
plishments and darkest sins of his region, are
viewed through the lens of biblical drama, a
drama wherein all humanity of every era is
profoundly broken and needs to return again
and again to its Creator for healing.
A thread of The Fiddler of Driskill Hill that
is particularly original is the subtlety and
reverence with which it upholds the written
word. In the "Little Gidding" section of The
Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot famously writes "our
concern was speech, and speech impelled us,
/ To purify the dialect of the tribe." Middle-
ton's poem "In Waking Dream" is a gem and
ought to be treasured by anyone who has ever
taught writing. It is a reflection upon two
different literary vocations: the teaching of
writing and the writing of poetry. The poet
reflects upon a colleague, a friend and fellow
college professor, who poured out her life in
the thankless task of teaching composition,
undeterred by even the dullest of under-
graduates. He writes of her as one dedicated
to "purifying the dialect of the tribe":
You seem the good physician of our
tongue
Gazing with your intense yet gentle
face
On all those grave contagions of the
human
Heart and mind-wrong cases,
fragments, run-ons,
Letters and numbers somehow gone
astray . . .

The first part of another poem couched
in academic life touches upon the sanctity
of the written word. "In Allen Hall-1.
Of Textual Editing" is a reflection upon
the task of the editor and scribe, one who
reviews texts and struggles to tease out their
clearest meanings so they might be profit-

ably read by many. To our jaded era, the
editor's task is a largely irrelevant academic
pastime with little significance to human
life; in Middleton's vision, the editor of even
secular texts is like a priest serving a sacred
cause. The poem concludes with a dismissal
of postmodern notions of language; placed
in the foreground is the heroic editor-he
who keeps alive the beauty of words in
which God the Word is always intimated:
We still believe in better texts and
worse
Unlike those who declare all words
absurd,
Corrupted Wits unfit to serve a king,
The Word Made Flesh, suffering to
be heard,
His life a holograph whose psalm we
sing.

To gain a perspective on the grandeur of
The Fiddler of Driskill Hill, a parting com-
parison with Masters's Spoon River Anthology
might be fitting. Perhaps the greatest poem
in Masters's Anthology is "The Hill," which
is the fitting opening to the collection of
poems. The "Hill" is, of course, the grave-
yard, and the poem contains a haunting
ubi sunt? refrain, asking where have all the
townsmen gone-and answering, "All, all,
are sleeping on the hill." This opening poem
concludes with the image of Old Fiddler
Jones, who all his ninety years played his
fiddle, as constant as death itself. The fiddler
images the dance of death, to which all are
invited and none can refuse.
Middleton's collection doesn't start with
the images of the fiddler and the hill; it
concludes with them. The final poem is
entitled "The Fiddler of Driskill Hill" and
is ostensibly about a girl who loved to play
her fiddle on Driskill Hill, the highest point
in all Louisiana. But unlike Masters's fiddler
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Modern Age - Fall 2014

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