"Nights speechless carnival
the painting
of the dark
with meteors" . . .
His tearingly romantic wit enjoys particularly the confusion of the terms of grammar and of simple arithmetic, the shuffling of words for emphasis or out of childlike perversity, brutal surprises like Catullus' glubit and excrucior. Nothing is more typical of him, however, and more peculiarly his own than his use of adjectives, his opposition of matter of fact words to words vaguely emotional, of exact, accurate, skilful, to wonderful, enormous, terrible:
"Her petaled flesh doth entertain
The adroit blood's mysterious skein" . . .
This trick (much more than a trick considering his incredibly keen feeling for such words) which he pushes farther than any predecessor has dared, gives him control over most poignant, fragile, untouched emotions. It also gives his verse an appearance of perverse abandon. Decidedly the poet does not want his verse any safer than standing on a tower in a gale. Suave, dangerous speed, dizzy falling, or veering in a reverberating emptiness—always the appeal to the motor and visceral sensations, the sensations of effective effort, of change of position, of alarming passive motion (as in an elevator) and to the primitive emotions of power and helplessness which lie just behind. Sometimes he makes this appeal direct by a word, a verb as in
"the erect deep upon me
in the last light
pours its eyeless miles"
but most of all by rhythm. His verse moves always continuously without hitches like a snake in the sunshine.
The subject matter appears to be mainly love and death.
