The Darkness and the Light

The Darkness and the Light by Anthony Hecht. Knopf, 68 pp., $23.00. The darkness and the light are alike, as the Psalm says, in Hecht's stunning eighth collection. A firsthand witness to the brutalities of combat and the concentration camp, Hecht offers a rational yet tender response to devastation; the darkness of his verse is that of the stoic, not the cynic, who must speak the truth no matter where it leads. Sometimes Hecht adopts a mask, as when the Book of Esther's "Haman," archetypal anti-Semite, proclaims his plans for genocide: "I shall have camps, Arbeit Macht Frei, the lure/Of hope, the chastening penalty of torture"; but despite anti-Semitism's historical persistence (hence the camps' infamous welcome), we know the torturer who speaks will end, at a king's command, on the gallows Haman intended for a Jew.

Hecht further explores Old Testament prefigurings of World War II in the triptych "Sacrifice," two sections of which are devoted to Abraham and Isaac, "sentenced and reprieved by the same Voice" ("Isaac"); the third, "1945," updates the myth as a French father places his own son's life at risk. A skeptic of heroic sacrifice, Hecht shows that the knowledge gained--that the father could stand by, a Nazi soldier's "rifle pointed right at the boy's chest"--negates any prospect of finding mercy or relief in the fact that the killing was averted.

Elsewhere, Hecht reflects on male rage and female bitterness: from Judith's distaste for men's "lecherous / Self-flattering appetites" ("Judith") to those voyeuristic "Elders" who spy lewdly on Susanna, love is, all too often, only "the dark pit" to which the epigraph of the latter poem translates. Hecht does at times see light, however transient or distant, as in "Illumination," an account of Brother Anselm's materials and technique: "Ground lapis for the sky, and scrolls of gold," but also the "topaz dust" of crocuses that "to the camel's hair tip of the finest brush" becomes "the light of dawn": here, art literally provides the light for the Nativity, even though such light, of course, is artifice. In "Memory," a room is "dark and airless" except for "twenty minutes in late afternoon" when "a radiance dimly akin to happiness" appears: more than a masterful description, "Memory" is metaphor for how the mind recalls the world briefly, imperfectly.

Ultimately, The Darkness and the Light reflects Hecht's lifelong commitment to integrity of language: he never minces words or prettifies the world, nor looks to tragedy as occasion to flex the poet's skills. Even as, in effortless trimeter, darkness threatens to shadow all, "Distantly lights go on. / Scattered like fallen sparks / Bedded in peat, they seem / Set in the plushest darks": for there to be light, Hecht understands, there must be darkness ("`The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee'").

COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
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