AN HERB BASKET,

By Richard Eberhart'26, Gummington Press: Cummington, Mass.1950. 8 pp., $1.00.

Bibliographically, this is an attractively hand-set and hand-printed paper-covered booklet, with, prefixed to the text, a printed etching or a basket of herbs (I hope it is a basket of herbs).

Metrically, this is a sequence of twenty numbered six-line stanzas, some of the lines being linked by rhymes or "off-rhymes," and the number of heavy stresses in a line mostly varying between three and four, though some lines might invite accentuation as pentameters.

Literarily (and importantly) this "herb basket" is a sequence of gnomic (that is, wisdomdistilling) stanzas, with a variety of ostensible themes. But these themes circle about, or are tangent to, a central question: what are we doing in writing? which is broached in the first stanza: We are fighting still to know What we are doing in writing. Are we making an engine, making It go? Are we playing with a balloon? Are we inviting Heraclitus? We are fighting; but do we know? and a central affirmation: what we can do in knowing, which is summarized in stanza 16: It is possible to wipe the slate clean. The senses require an anarchy. Knowledge is not something stated, But a red dream; to ignore The mean is to defy the norm, And wash the world to the newly seen.

It is evident at a glance that the answer to the central question is implied in this central affirmation. But to discover the entirety of that implication is likely to require a long, steady look.

More succinctly, every affirmation in these stanzas implies a question; and every question, an affirmation. Of course, as befits poetry, these vibrations in the ether of mind are mostly embodied in images. Like herbs, these images exhale a pungent fragrance. The pungence, as the wise have long known, is efficacious for healing. The fragrance, as nobody needs to be told, is the poetry. This particular basket teases and charms us with reminiscences we can almost achieve, with identifications we can almost make. And it teases us with the hope that some day soon, Mr. Eberhart may throw open to the public the gardens whence these herbs were culled. For he is, surely, a lineal descendant of A. Marvell. May he claim his heritage!