Books: Can All Come Green Again?

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CHANGE OF WEATHER by Winfield Townley Scott. 64 pages. Doub/eday. $2.95.

Old Transcendentalists never die. Ignoring the Bomb, the Beats, the Beatles, and other forces of change and disintegration, a small group of American poets continues to write mild, mellow verse in the Concord manner of Emerson and Thoreau. Their themes are hill and dale, solitude and sadness; their tone is elegiac; and the best of them is Winfield Townley Scott.

Scott's poetry has neither the topical fire of a Robert Lowell nor the flinty edge of fellow New Englander Robert Frost. Neither profound nor powerful, the poet at age 54 writes what he describes in his present volume as verse of "regret"—for lost youth, lost love, lost chances:

There is a time to read Ecclesiastes When you are full-grown young. So swollen with joy, so mad-sad, And all so safely so As in a play— Yourself to enjoy at one remove. There is a time again When you are beginning to be old. Ecclesiastes opens the hole in the wind Through which, soon, you will walk forever.

What saves Scott's poems from sentimentality or empty despair is an astringent stoicism. One of his children breaks a shell that Scott has treasured since childhood:

A tiny cave carved in far-off seas Whose dazzle of sun-struck gold-green Here incredibly fixed; and the sound of

seas Which was, I grew to learn, my pulse's

sound. Now dropped and broken by that child

of mine Too young to know what he has

destroyed; Too young to tell me what I should

have known.

The American imagination has largely outgrown the old New England symbols of summerhouse and Christmas tree, kites and the Fourth of July. In adhering to them, Scott will not change the course of modern poetry, nor is he likely to serve as an inspiration to the younger poets. Rut he can often teach moderns a thing or two about love and other excitements they have lost or unlearned. As he wrote in an earlier volume:

What I have learned enough To have as air to breathe Returns as memory Of undiminished love: That no man's creation But enlarges me O all come green again.