The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer by Robert Hillyer

The Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer Reviews

• 
  Nancy

  "Quite simply, for a long long time now, You've made me happy, sad, and tremendously alert with your poems. For all this, I want to thank you." Letter written by Ray Bradbury to Robert Hillyer on September 10, 1959
  
  The Collected Poems by Robert Hillyer was one of my first book purchases bought in 1968. I read those poems over and over. Robert Stillman Hillyer won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. He was part of the Harvard Aesthetes, a group that included Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, S, Foster Damon, and John Brooks Wheelwright. He was an ambulance driver in the war, and taught in many universities.
  
  The poems were very nostalgic.I found especially poignant the poem Julia's Room, which was one of Hillyer's poems set to music.
  
  He went up the dark stairs and knocked at Julia's door;
  It opened, and a blade of light cut the dim hall,
  But the girl was a stranger, and when he spoke to her
  She could not--or would not--understand at all.
  She looked at him a moment--horrified, he thought--
  Then slammed the door shut.
  
  Bewildered, he guessed that while he was away
  Julia must have invited a friend he had never known;
  Sometimes when she asked an old friend to stay
  She moved to the attic room and gave up her own.
  So he climbed the second fight, but that floor was dark
  As rain-drenched bark.
  
  "Julia!" he called but no light flashed on.
  "Julia!" he called down the stair-well gloom.
  ...."Whoever you are, for God's sake be gone!"
  Then he remembered it was fifty years ago,
  And he melted like snow.
  
  Oh, I loved nostalgia!
  
  Another poem I especially liked was The Victim.
  
  The hummingbird that darts and hovers
  Made one fatal dart--alas!--
  Against a counterfeit of flowers
  Reflected in the window glass.
  When four-o'clocks had sunk in shadow,
  The window caught an extra glint
  Of color, like the sudden rainbow
  Arching the purple firmament.
  Transcendent are the traceries
  Illusion weaves to set a snare;
  The quick competitor of bees,
  Trusting his universe of air
  Fr flight and fancy, dazzled so
  In quest of sweetness, was waylaid
  By something hard that had a glow
  Brighter than the garden made.
  Illusion shatters; the ideal
  Is much more ruthless than the real.
  The visionary hummingbird
  Hit nothingness, and hit it hard.
  
  Throughout the volume I underlined lines that caught my heart or mind.
  
  "Is there nobody now
  Who can speak with my speech
  But the wind in th ruin,
  The waves on the beach?
  from Manorbrier
  
  In Thermopylae he wrote, "Men lied to them and so they went to die. Some fell, knowing that they were deceived, And some escaped, and bitterly bereaved, Beheld the truth they loved shrink to a lie."
  
  This was deep stuff!
  
  "For life deals thus with Man, to die alone deceived or with the mass, Or disillusioned to complete his span. Thermopylae or Golgotha, all one, The young dead legions in the narrow pass, he stark black cross against the setting sun."
  
  I didn't know what Thermopylae was, or hardly even Golgotha although the cross reference may have helped me on that. It gave me something to think about.
  
  His long poem The Gates of the Compass II. The Nightmare was quite horrible and Gothic to me. It starts,
  We come on leaden feet, we come with leaden
  Tread along the haunted corridors
  Through darkness void as in a dying brain
  Where one by one the thoughts have flickered out.
  We are told the unknown dead loved life, and not to dismiss his death, for "In him you weep the doom that is your own."
  
  Traditional verse fell out of favor. Hillyer seems to be a forgotten poet. I had not picked up this volume in years. But the poems spoke to my girl's mind and, like Ray Bradbury, I want to thank him.
  
  
  http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.co...