[In the following essay, Mezey praises the power of Justice's imagery and the seeming effortlessness with which it is evoked.]

In an essay published about ten years ago, Donald Justice wrote: "Words sometimes, through likeness of sound, become bound to one another by ties remotely like those of human kinship. This is not to propose that any meaning attaches to the sounds independent of the words. But the interlocking sounds do seem to reinforce and in some curious way to authenticate the meanings of the words, perhaps indirectly to deepen and enlarge them. A part of the very nature of poetry lies in this fact."

For at least one reader, perhaps the essential part. (One can think of poets who have written beautifully without metaphor, without sensuous or concrete diction, without subject or drama, even without intelligence, but none who has done so without an ear.) And I would go further: I would say that the poet who has the requisite power not only discloses the very nature of poetry but seems to penetrate to the very nature of experience. I am not speaking now of onomatopoeia or the various kinds of mimicry, crude and sophisticated, that ingenious poets are capable of. Any poet of sufficient skill can slow down his tempo and articulation "When Ajax strives, some rocks' vast weight to throw," or contrive the flashy magic of Tennyson's moaning doves and murmuring bees. Justice's skill is more than sufficient for such professional illusions as in

     To stand, braced in a swaying vestibule,

or, at somewhat greater length,

              And then a
     Slow blacksnake, lazy with long sunning, slides
     Down from its slab, and through the thick grass, and hides
     Somewhere among the purpling wild verbena.

(We shall save the delights of that characteristic rhyme for another occasion.) No, I am thinking rather of something like Wordsworth's "Or the unimaginable touch of Time," something that cannot quite properly be called imitative form but thrills us all the same with its power to evoke, by means of little more, apparently, than a couple of very light accents and a diction almost entirely abstract, an intense, almost physical apprehension of the slow, soundless crumbling of the centuries. Wordsworth calls it unimaginable even as he makes us imagine it. In such lines we have the sensation that words have somehow slipped free from their characters, their shadowy life in the world of signs, and come down, as Yeats implored his sages to do, to participate in the world of experience. It is as if we are touching, through the medium of language, that constantly receding wonder, reality. We feel that the poem is creating truth itself. Perhaps that is why we cannot do without it, those of us who cannot.

It is not always easy to distinguish between the obvious sorts of verbal mimesis, however fine, and this deeper thing I have been trying to describe. One mark of the distinction may be that the former is likely to be susceptible of analysis and the latter not. For example, in this lovely quatrain about a sofa in a dance teacher's parlor (her "makeshift ballroom"),

     At lesson time, pushed back, it used to be
     The thing we managed somehow just to miss
     With our last-second dips and twirls—all this
     While the Victrola wound down gradually.

I would say that that last line is a particularly beautiful instance of imitation. One could lead a reasonably sensitive student to see how the third line with its vivid lexicon, fluid cadence and short vowels speeds to the dash, to be pulled up short as the last line, beginning with the long "while," almost a syllable and a half, descends to the long vowels in mid-line, the insistent nasals, the juncture that enforces a slight pause between "wound" and the unaccented but long, heavy "down," the faded rhyme, and the limpness, the dying fall, of the adverb with its feeble final accent. (Of course it goes without saying that all such effects depend utterly on the meanings of the words; meters and tropes of sound mean nothing in themselves. So I began my brief analysis by indicating the lexicon, and so Justice was careful to include a similar stipulation in the paragraph I quoted earlier, for there are still many simple souls in the textbooks and classrooms who think that every trochee expresses conflict or resistance and that sibilance in a line of verse signifies evil. One would think that Ransom had laughed such readers off the stage forever; alas, apparently not.)

But how, I wonder, would I analyze the effect of these two lines from an elegy for a friend kicked to death in an alley (a poem, by the way, that has my nomination for the best villanelle in the language)?

     I picture the snow as falling without hurry
     To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely.

How does he do it, and so effortlessly, or so it seems? That calm, steady, almost nerveless line, that dry, cruel phrase, "without hurry," the infinitive that suggests intention without in the least asserting it, the intricate pattern of sound in the second line, subtler than any chiasmus, flakes of vowel and consonant that bond together to cover the fifteen syllables of the five-beater completely—I am waxing impressionistic because I am at a loss to account for the haunting power of these cold-eyed and heartbreaking lines.

Or take the ending of his exquisite version of Rilke's "Letzer Abend," where the doomed officer's jacket hangs across the chair

     Like the coats scarecrows wear
 
     And which the birdshadows flee and scatter from;
     Or like the skin of some great battle-drum.

It is elementary to suggest that the static quality of the trimeter derives partly from the heavy ionic foot, the thick jam of consonants, especially the s juncture, and the internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration, but it is impossible, at least to me, to tell clearly how the extra syllable of "birdshadows" and the lighter assonance of "-shadows" and "scatter" seem to embody the wild and panicky movement the line describes; it has something to do, surely, with the dramatic preposition that ends the clause and the ominous semi-colon, not to mention the odd force of our realization that we are following not the fleeing birds but their shadows, but now we are trying to explain the inexplicable. And that great last line—yes, only a dullard would fail to feel the reverberation of the internal rhyme (another one!), but what accounts for the power of the final word, a power that lies to some extent in its nearness to and its distance from being a triple rhyme and seems almost to summon up the much more dreadful scattering to come? I don't know.

This is state-of-the-art, as they say. I wish it were truly representative of the state of the art. But, still, it gives some cheer to remember that at the end of the 20th century, when American poetry is drearier and more amateurish than it has been at any time since the end of the 19th, a few writers are "saying the thing once for all and perfectly." The gratitude I feel for "Last Evening" and for so many of Donald Justice's poems is the gratitude I feel for any act or gesture of love and loving care. That is, no doubt, "a love that masquerades as pure technique." But it is love.