Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 97

THE MEANING OF MEASURE

Excurses such as Burke's are predicated
On nature as a kind of constancy.
But it, by definition, changes always;
The lapping waves of potentiality
On actual sands. That endless mortal throb
Of dark descending where land slips to sea.

And in the final lines of this exceptionally profound and stimulating Letter, Wilson voices his hope for artistic harmony between
man and nature, a hope that he surprisingly but cogently condenses into a revised version of de Maistre's monitory tale of the
boy and the sparrow:
I, like de Maistre's boy, have grown up, discerned
Authority of a supernatural
Order shows much-but only to complete
The proper order in the human halls
We each pace leaving echoes in our wake.
And so we find that the grip of our pleasure
Need not choke everything it can, but may loose
The fist of art to fit the palm of nature.

In these lines, Wilson-like Steele-reconciles disparate perspectives on man and on nature in a recognizably Aristotelian
response to those perspectives. In both the explicit reasoning
leading to that Aristotelian harmony and in the implicit persuasion of his own poetic art, "the discipline of meter serves [just
as it does for Steele] as a sure foundation." So important is that
foundation that readers will want to ponder deeply both what
Wilson says about meter and what he does with meter. Such
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