And on the white pillows of men asleep:
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he night’s a pale pastureland of peace, And something condones the world, incorrigibly . . . —or against the satisfying accentual swing of lines likeHammering the door and yelling like a slaughter-house and;I'd as soon kiss the bottom of a Barbary ape. In poetry itself, since the second world war, we havetwo outstanding experiments in stress and alliterativemetre, both of which are for different reasons highlyrelevant to any modern poet’s task of translating fromOld English. W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, a‘baroque eclogue’ (of about the length of Beowulf) onthe state of man in a twentieth-century society at war,is written for the most part in an Anglo-Saxon metrewith careful alliteration; it uses a very wide vocabulary,and the technical skill involved is virtuosic. RichardEberhart’s Brotherhood of Men also deals with anxietyand the twentieth century, but is a narrative poem ofCorregidor and Bataan and the American war in thePacific, of some 300 lines, in Anglo-Saxon metre butwith sporadic and irregular alliteration. There are instructive differences between the twopoems. Technically, The Age of Anxiety gives theimpression of being streamlined; its lines are shorter,less rough, less willing to risk the overloading of
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