Joan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom
W.H. Auden spent much of the summer of 1946 in a beach house he shared with his friends James and Tania Stern in Cherry Grove on Fire Island, just south of Long Island. He was at work on his long poem The Age of Anxiety that would be published the following year; he had also recently been appointed editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, taking over from Archibald MacLeish, whose multifarious commitments had meant he could devote little time to rigorous perusal of the manuscripts of first volumes of poems sent on to him by Yale University Press. Auden, then at the height of his prestige, was the first choice of the Yale committee that met on May 6 to decide MacLeish’s successor. He accepted in a letter of May 10, characteristically observing: “I am not at all sure that a poet is the best judge of his contemporaries, but I’m willing to have a shot at it if you are.” In any event he would edit the series through 1959, and launch the careers of a number of the most important poets of the post-war era: Adrienne Rich (1951), W.S. Merwin (1952), John Ashbery (1956), James Wright (1957), and John Hollander (1958) all had their first books chosen by Auden for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets.1946年夏天，奥登在长岛以南的火岛上的樱桃树林里和朋友詹姆斯和塔妮娅·斯特恩合租了一座海滩别墅。他正在为自己的长诗《焦虑的年代》工作，该诗将于次年出版；他最近还被任命为耶鲁大学青年诗人系列丛书的编辑，接替了阿奇博尔德·麦克莱什（Archibald MacLeish）的工作，麦克莱什的各种各样的工作使他几乎不能花时间认真研读第一卷诗歌的手稿耶鲁大学出版社寄给他的。5月6日，耶鲁委员会召开会议，决定麦克莱什的继任者，奥登是当时声望最高的人选。他在5月10日的一封信中接受了这一观点，并特别指出：“我根本不确定诗人是同时代人的最佳评判者，但如果你是的话，我愿意试一试。”，并启动了许多战后最重要诗人的事业：阿德里安·里奇（1951年）、W.S.梅尔文（1952年）、约翰·阿什伯里（1956年）、詹姆斯·赖特（1957年）和约翰·霍兰德（1958年）的第一本书都被奥登选为耶鲁大学“年轻诗人系列”出版。
None of the ten manuscripts that Auden took with him to Fire Island in the summer of 1946, however, seemed to him worthy of the accolade. Accordingly he wrote to Eugene Davidson, the Yale University Press editor in charge of the series, with a suggestion of his own: “I have just heard that the poems of Joan Murray which I told you about are available and, in my opinion, they are the best we have. May I have your permission to choose them? She died in 1942 at the age of 23” (she was in fact 24). Auden knew about Murray’s work because she had been a student of his at the New School some six years earlier. Although it must have struck Davidson and his fellow Yale editors as rather odd to make the award, which was intended to promote “such verse as seems to give the fairest promise for the future of American poetry,” to quote from the statement of purpose included in early volumes in the series, to a dead poet born in London of Canadian parents, no one at the press demurred. Poems by Joan Murray, 1917–1942, was duly published in May of 1947, attracting reviews in papers and journals such as Poetry, the Saturday Review, the New York Times Book Review, and the New Yorker. William Meredith, who had himself received the prize in 1944 for his first collection, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, acclaimed Murray’s “powerful and distinctive voice” in Poetry, but reported himself puzzled by her “abrupt transitions from image to image,” transitions “too quick and often too irrational for this reader.” Milton Crane in the New York Times rather more harshly described the poems as giving “the impression of being unborn.”然而，在他看来，1946年夏天奥登带到火岛的十本手稿中，没有一本值得称赞。因此，他写信给耶鲁大学出版社负责该系列的编辑尤金·戴维森（Eugene Davidson），并提出了自己的建议：“我刚刚听说，琼·莫里的诗我告诉过你，而且在我看来，它们是我们最好的。你能允许我选择它们吗？她于1942年去世，终年23岁”（事实上她24岁）。奥登知道莫里的工作，因为她六年前在新学校是他的学生。虽然戴维森和他的耶鲁大学编辑们一定觉得很奇怪，因为这个奖项的目的是为了向一位出生在伦敦、父母是加拿大人的已故诗人颁发这个奖项，而这个奖项的目的是为了推广“似乎给美国诗歌未来最公平的承诺”的诗句，新闻界没有人反对。琼·默里的诗作，1917-1942年，于1947年5月正式出版，吸引了许多论文和期刊的评论，如《诗歌》、《星期六评论》、《纽约时报书评》和《纽约客》。1944年，威廉·梅雷迪思（William Meredith）因其第一部作品《来自不可能之地的情书》而获得该奖，他称赞莫里在诗歌中的“强大而独特的声音”，但他自己却对她“从形象到形象的突然转变感到困惑，《纽约时报》的米尔顿·克雷恩（Milton Crane）在《纽约时报》（newyork Times）上更严厉地形容这些诗给人“未出生的印象”
The volume came with a foreword by Auden and an editor’s note by Grant Code, a writer and lecturer on theatre and dance, and founder and manager of the Brooklyn Museum Dance Center that ran from 1935 to 1938. Code had not known the dead poet personally, but he was a friend of Murray’s mother, who was a diseuse and moved in theatrical circles, and he was an occasional dabbler in verse himself (his work is featured alongside that of Malcolm Cowley and John Brooks Wheelwright in the anthology Eight More Harvard Poets of 1923). In his negotiations with Yale, Auden declared himself uncomfortable with the notion that each book he selected should be introduced by the editor of the series, complaining:这本书的前言是由奥登写的，格兰特·科德是一位戏剧和舞蹈方面的作家和讲师，也是布鲁克林博物馆舞蹈中心的创始人和经理，他在1935年至1938年期间写了一篇编者按。科德本人并不认识这位死去的诗人，但他是默里母亲的朋友，默里的母亲患有疾病，在戏剧界很受欢迎，他自己偶尔也会涉足诗歌（他的作品与马尔科姆·考利和约翰·布鲁克斯·惠赖特在《1923年哈佛八大诗人选集》中的作品并驾齐驱）。在与耶鲁大学的谈判中，奥登宣称自己对自己选择的每本书都应该由该系列的编辑介绍的想法感到不安，他抱怨道：
These introductions always sound awful, and the whole idea that a new poet should be introduced by an older one as if he were a debutante or a new face cream, deplorable and false.这些介绍听起来总是糟糕透顶，而一个新诗人应该由一个年长的诗人来介绍，就好像他是一个初出茅庐的人或是一个新的面霜，这种想法是可悲和错误的。
In his very brief (it runs to a mere page and a half) foreword to his initial selection he makes exactly this point in his opening paragraph, revealing that his own “personal reaction” to a book of poems with an introduction by an older writer “is a suspicion that the publishers are afraid that the poems are not very good and want reassurance.” Auden, as would become his wont in these introductions, pretty much evades the duty of making a case for Murray’s work, limiting himself to a single sentence that attempts to articulate its distinctive qualities: “in Miss Murray’s poetry,” he observes (and it’s not an observation that gets us very far),在他对他最初的选择所作的非常简短（只有一页半）的前言中，他在开头一段就明确地指出了这一点，他透露自己对一本有老作家介绍的诗集的“个人反应”是一种怀疑，即出版商害怕这些诗不是很好，希望得到安慰。奥登，就像他在这些介绍中惯用的那样，几乎逃避了为默里的作品辩护的责任，他把自己局限于一句话，试图表达它的独特品质：“在默里小姐的诗歌中，”他观察到（这并不是一个能让我们走得很远的观察结果），
the dominant emotion is, I think, a feeling of isolation, and her characteristic images tactile shapes which reassure her that “Here” and “There” are both real and related to each other.主要的情感，我认为，是一种孤立的感觉，她独特的形象触觉形状，使她确信，“这里”和“那里”都是真实的，而且是相互关联的。
This could surely be applied to any number of volumes of poetry published since the Romantics.这无疑适用于自浪漫主义以来出版的任何数量的诗集。
The editor’s note by Grant Code would have indicated to purchasers of the book back in 1947 a rather stronger sense of the unusual nature of Murray’s poetry; the only other poet mentioned in Code’s note is Emily Dickinson, and his discussion of his task as Murray’s editor inevitably recalls the controversy attending editorial attempts to standardize Dickinson’s work. Murray’s manuscripts, which were handed over to him by Murray’s mother (known as Peggy, her full name being Florence Margaret Toaps Murray) were, he reports, in a state of “confusion, pages of prose mixed with pages of verse and scarcely two pages of anything together that belonged together”: many poems existed in different versions, Murray’s spelling was “capricious,” few of the poems were titled, and fewer properly punctuated. Some words were clearly “makeshift” choices that she intended later to revise, and some downright ungrammatical. He tried to fix most of these, although the book does include the odd verbal peculiarity, such as the last line of “Sleep, Whose Hour Has Come” that makes a verb into an adjective: “And sleep is still retribute.” On occasion Code took the liberty of substituting a choice of his own in place of what Murray had written, as when he altered “connubial” to “convivial” in line seventeen of “Believe Me, My Fears Are Ancient,” on the grounds that the effect of “connubial” is “disturbing.” I rather regret this particular editorial decision, since the poem, like a number of Murray’s, is about what one might call the procreative urge, “the burst into spring,” and the lines in question depict the human mind casting off gloom and doubts, “conglomerate mourners,” and rejoicing in the desire “to slip over and be connubial,” or as Code would have it “convivial.” It surely takes an exceptionally sensitive reader to be disturbed by Murray’s original choice, which hardly plunges us into the territory of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.编者按格兰特·科德的注释，早在1947年，就已经向这本书的购买者表明了一种相当强烈的意识，即莫里诗歌的不同寻常的本质；代码注释中唯一提到的诗人是艾米莉·狄金森，而他对自己作为默里编辑的任务的讨论，不可避免地让人想起了当时编辑界试图规范狄金森作品的争议。他说，默里的手稿是由默里的母亲（佩吉，全名弗洛伦斯·玛格丽特·托帕斯·默里）交给他的手稿，处于一种“混乱的状态，几页散文和几页诗句混合在一起，几乎连两页纸的东西都不属于一起”：许多诗都有不同的版本，默里的拼写是“反复无常的”，很少有诗有标题，也很少有恰当的标点符号。有些词显然是“临时”的选择，她打算稍后修改，有些则完全不合文法。他试图修正其中的大部分，尽管这本书确实包含了一些奇怪的语言特点，比如最后一行“睡眠，谁的时间到了”把一个动词变成了一个形容词：“而且睡眠仍然是再创造的。”有时，代码会像他修改时一样，随意用自己的选择来代替默里写的东西“相信我，我的恐惧是古老的”第17行中的“婚外恋”到“欢乐”，理由是“婚外恋”的效果是“令人不安的”。我很遗憾这个特殊的编辑决定，因为这首诗，就像许多默里的诗，是关于一种可以称之为生殖冲动的“春天的爆发”，和这些台词描绘了人类摆脱阴郁和怀疑的心态，“集体哀悼者”，并为“想逃避而结婚”而欢呼雀跃，或者就像代码中所说的那样“欢乐”。毫无疑问，一个异常敏感的读者会被穆雷最初的选择所扰乱，而这几乎没有把我们带入这个领域查泰莱夫人的情人。
Code’s task in sorting through the material he was given and making from these drafts a publishable book was clearly a formidable one, though we don’t know quite how formidable. The trunk containing all of Murray’s original manuscripts was lost by removal men, or so it was thought, when her mother sold her daughter’s papers, along with her own much more voluminous archives, to Smith College in 1968. (My inquiries to the current Smith archivist about this lost trunk stimulated a search for it, and I am delighted to report that it has now been found.) Code evidently smoothed and regularized; he added the word “Trees” off his own bat to a poem, without telling us which one (my guess is stanza four of “Spring”: “Sap flies high to the head of tall / Trees in a leaping drunk”). He adjusted her syntax and added the occasional “colorless connective” where he felt it was needed. For titles he normally used the first line, in the mode of Auden’s Poems of 1930, but sometimes came up with a descriptive title of his own.代码的任务是整理他得到的材料，并根据这些草稿编写一本可出版的书，这显然是一项艰巨的任务，尽管我们不知道有多艰巨。1968年，莫里的母亲把女儿的论文连同她自己更为庞大的档案卖给史密斯学院时，那只装有莫里所有原稿的箱子被搬运工弄丢了，或者说是这样。（我向现任史密斯档案管理员询问这只丢失的树干，激起了人们对它的搜寻，我很高兴地报告，它现在已经被找到了。）代码显然经过了平滑和规范化；他在一首诗中从自己的球棒上加上了“树”这个词，没有告诉我们是哪一个（我猜是“春天”的第四节：“酒鬼在跳跃，树液飞到高高的树的头上”）。他调整了她的语法，在他觉得有必要的地方加上了“无色的连接词”。在标题上，他通常使用第一行，以奥登1930年诗歌的模式，但有时会想出一个自己的描述性标题。
It is easy to deride what John Ashbery has called, in a short piece on Murray published in the Poetry Project Newsletter of October / November 2003, these “ministrations of a well-meaning but somewhat heavy-handed editor.” Code also got increasingly on Auden’s wick as work on the book proceeded, although not as much as Peggy, about whom Auden wrote to Davidson at Yale with a word to the wise: “From what I know of Mama, I would advise you confidentially to deal with her through Mr. Code.” Indeed, Auden also told Davidson that Mrs. Murray had once written him a letter accusing him of having killed her daughter. Possibly Murray mère attributed her daughter’s early death in January of 1942 not to complications deriving from a rheumatic heart condition, but to the compositional fever that her attendance of Auden’s lectures on “Poetry and Culture” at the New School in 1940 had inspired. (Much of her oeuvre, it seems, was written in the sixteen months left to her after she began taking Auden’s course.) Code omitted from the book forty poems that he decided were “incomplete, fragmentary, or immature,” but he refused to grant Auden’s pleas that he cull still further. He also wanted to include as an appendix a biographical sketch he titled “A Faun Surmising,” made up partly of his observations and speculations, and partly of passages from Murray’s letters and diaries. A copy of this survives in the Smith Archives, and I would dearly love to read it. He apparently compiled notes for the poems too. Confronted by this editorial apparatus, Auden firmly drew the line: he instructed Davidson that Code’s notes and “A Faun Surmising” were not to appear in the book “because — entre nous — they make me very sick.” In his foreword he sternly insists on the importance of not being “distracted by sentimental speculation” about the author’s life and early death, or what she might have gone on to write.在2003年10月/11月的诗歌项目通讯上发表的一篇关于默里的短文中，人们很容易嘲笑约翰·阿什伯里所说的“一个善意但有点严厉的编辑的管理”。随着这本书的写作，这些代码也越来越受到奥登的关注，尽管没有佩吉那么多奥登给耶鲁大学的戴维森写了一封信给智者：“根据我对妈妈的了解，我建议你秘密地通过代码先生来对付她。”事实上，奥登还告诉戴维森，莫里太太曾经给他写过一封信，指控他杀害了她的女儿。可能是莫里·梅雷把她女儿在1942年1月的早逝归咎于风湿性心脏病引起的并发症，而是1940年她在新学校参加奥登关于“诗歌与文化”的讲座所激发的创作热。（她的大部分作品，似乎都是在她开始学习奥登课程后剩下的十六个月里写的。）书中省略了四十首诗，他认为这些诗是“不完整的、残缺的或不成熟的”，但他拒绝接受奥登的请求，要求他进一步挑选。他还想在附录中加入一个他称之为“牧神的推测”的传记小品，部分由他的观察和推测组成，部分来自莫里的信件和日记。这本书的副本保存在史密斯档案馆里，我非常乐意阅读。他显然也为这些诗编了笔记。面对这一编辑机构，奥登坚定地划清了界限：他指示戴维森不要在书中出现代码注释和“牧神的推测”，“因为它们让我很不舒服”。在前言中，他严正地坚持，不要“被感情上的臆测分散注意力”作者的生前和早逝，或者她可能会继续写些什么。
Code may well have been “heavy-handed” on occasion, but I would like to speak up briefly on his arrangement of the volume into seven books “grouped,” in his words, “by subject.” Within these books individual pieces are carefully ordered so as to create, where possible, a sense of “sequence and development of thought running through several poems.” Murray’s idiom can seem, as the reviews by William Meredith and Milton Crane testify, so mobile, so resistant to attempts to parse it into prose sense, that one can lose sight of the poem’s “subject.” Code, it strikes me, thought long and hard about the best way to bring to the fore Murray’s thematic concerns, and his arrangements are both effective and helpful in getting a grip on the volume as a whole. This coherence is stronger in some books than in others: many of the poems in book one are urban and verging on the satirical, while those in three deal with nature and rural life (mainly in Vermont); most of those in the short book four approach religious issues, whereas those in six are predominantly concerned with conquest, empire, and exile; and those in seven with mythological figures, from Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess, to Penelope, Ulysses, and Orpheus. Two and five have less distinctive characters, but one gets runs of poems on topics such as art, sleep, and the sea. I wouldn’t deny that many of Murray’s poems veer hither and thither in all manner of competing directions, skipping from image to image with electrical speed and insouciance, but beneath their hectic surfaces one can often discern a shadowy but purposeful progression of thought and argument.代码有时很可能是“繁文缛节”，但我想简单地谈谈他将这本书分为七本书，用他的话来说是“按主题分组”。在这些书中，每一个部分都被仔细地排序，以便在可能的情况下创造出，一种“思想的顺序和发展贯穿几首诗”的感觉。正如威廉·梅雷迪思和米尔顿·克莱恩的评论所证明的那样，默里的习语似乎是如此的流动，如此抗拒将其解析为散文的意义，以至于人们会忽略这首诗的“主题”。代码，它让我印象深刻，经过深思熟虑，默里对主题的关注才是最好的表现方式，他的安排既有效又有助于把握整个作品。这种连贯性在一些书中比在其他书中更为强烈：第一册中的许多诗是城市的，近乎讽刺的，而第三册中的诗是关于自然和乡村生活的（主要是在佛蒙特州）；第四本短篇小说中的大部分涉及宗教问题，而第六卷中的诗主要涉及征服、帝国和流放；还有七个有神话人物的人，从埃及猫神巴斯特到佩内洛普、尤利西斯和俄耳甫斯。两个和五个没有那么鲜明的人物，但有一个是关于艺术、睡眠和海洋等主题的诗集。我不否认，穆雷的许多诗在不同的方向上来回变换，以电的速度和漫不经心的方式从一个图像跳到另一个图像，但在它们忙乱的表面下，人们常常可以看到一个模糊但有目的的思想和争论的进展。
Among the items listed in her section of the Murray archives at Smith is an edition of J.B. Leishman’s 1941 Hogarth Press edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Selected Poems. If Auden was evidently the primary and fundamental catalyst for Murray’s sudden and startling poetic “burst into spring,” it was the Rilke-influenced strand of Auden found throughout Poems, and in parts of The Orators (1932) and Look, Stranger! (1936), rather than the political, journalistic, camp, comic, or moralistic aspects of his work, that Murray appropriated and developed into a medium of her own. Auden’s influence, it’s worth stressing at this point, was everywhere in the poetry that was being written in the late thirties and early forties both in Britain and America, from Philip Larkin to John Berryman, from Stephen Spender to Delmore Schwartz, from Nicholas Moore to Elizabeth Bishop and Randall Jarrell. Murray homed in on the cryptic, elliptical idiom that dominates Auden’s first Faber collection, as the first piece in her own Poems rather too graphically demonstrates. It consists of three abab rhyming quatrains:在她在史密斯的默里档案馆中列出的物品中，有一本J.B.利什曼1941年出版的雷纳·玛丽亚·里尔克诗选的霍加斯出版社版。如果说奥登显然是默里突然而令人吃惊的诗歌“突如其来的春天”的主要和根本的催化剂，那就是在诗歌中，以及在《演说家》（1932年）和《瞧，陌生人》中发现的受里尔克影响的奥登！（1936），而不是他的作品中的政治、新闻、阵营、喜剧或道德方面，而是被默里所利用并发展成她自己的媒介。在这一点上，值得强调的是，奥登的影响无处不在，在英国和美国，从菲利普·拉金到约翰·伯里曼，从斯蒂芬·斯宾德到德尔莫尔·施瓦茨，从尼古拉斯·摩尔到伊丽莎白·毕肖普和兰德尔·贾雷尔，在英国和美国的诗歌中无处不在。默里在奥登的第一本费伯作品集中体现了一个神秘的、椭圆形的习语，这是她自己诗歌中的第一个部分过于生动地展示了这一点。它由三首阿巴布押韵绝句组成：
If, here in the city, lights glare from various source,
Look out of the window, thin-faced man.
Three portent cities repeat the pattern and the course
That history ran.
Three slender veins, clotted and ambiguous,
Are those inlocked hands.
Three startled cries now rise incredulous,
Where once sprang barren sands.
Give back night to receding sky.
Let stars (the things that remain)
Orbit their quiet to the lie
That is here city and various city pain.
— If Here in the City
The noun “portent” in line three has been weirdly wrenched into use as an adjective, as if the course of history were insisting that there wasn’t time for the –ous to be added to it, or for a more meaningful word to be found. A similar kind of radical compression appears to be at work in the omissions of the final line, making the poem feel like a bathysphere that has ventured too deep into the ocean for its hull to withstand the steadily building pressure. From Auden, Murray derives terms and means for communicating in shorthand or code a sense of the panoramic sweep of evolution, which is surely the force exerting the pressure, and she also borrows his cinematic technique of cutting from human distress to the indifference of the universe: “startled cries,” “barren sands,” “various city pain,” “receding sky,” and “stars” in orbit. Auden’s vision of the innate treachery of civilization is activated by her use of the word “lie,” rhyming with its cosmic antithesis “sky,” and as in early Auden, authority of delivery is fused with the opacity of the message: why three cities, three veins, three cries? How can “slender,” “clotted” veins also be “inlocked [another nonce word] hands”? Are these hands meant to suggest that the three cities represent intertwined civilizations rising from the barren sands in some system-based reading, like that propounded by Yeats in A Vision, of human history? How odd to describe “barren sands” as having “sprang”! Might it, one begins to wonder, be as pointless to try to interpret such a poem as it is one by, say, Ern Malley, the fictitious Australian poet created by James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1944 as a means of satirizing the obscurity of modern verse?第三行中的名词“portent”奇怪地被用作形容词，好像历史进程坚持认为没有时间添加“ous”，也没有时间找到更有意义的词。在最后一行的省略中，类似的激进的压缩似乎也在起作用，这首诗让人感觉像一个深海球，它的船体无法承受稳定的建筑压力。从奥登那里，莫里获得了用速记或代码交流的术语和方法，即进化的全景，这无疑是施加压力的力量，她还借用了他的电影技巧，从人类的痛苦到宇宙的冷漠：“惊叫”，“贫瘠的沙子，“各种城市的痛苦”，“渐渐远去的天空”，还有轨道上的“星星”。奥登对文明与生俱来的背叛的憧憬被她使用的“谎言”一词激活，与它的宇宙对立词“天空”押韵，就像早期奥登一样，传递的权威与信息的不透明相融合：为什么三座城市、三条静脉、三次哭泣？“纤细”、“凝块”的静脉怎么也能“锁在手上”？这些手是否意味着这三座城市代表着从贫瘠的沙漠中崛起的相互交织的文明，就像叶芝在《人类历史的愿景》中提出的那样？把“贫瘠的沙子”说成“突然出现”是多么奇怪啊！人们开始怀疑，试图解释这样一首诗是没有意义的吗，比如说，由詹姆斯·麦考利和哈罗德·斯图尔特于1944年创作的虚构的澳大利亚诗人厄恩·马利（Ern Malley），作为讽刺现代诗歌晦涩晦涩的一种手段？
By 1946 of course, when he decided to award Murray’s manuscript the prize, Auden had moved decisively away from the idiom that his pupil sets about reanimating in a poem such as “If Here in the City”; and Auden would in later life often cast a pretty cold eye on the more vatic aspects of his early work, regretting in particular the influence of Rilke, whom he felt had lured him into writing too much “Poetry with a capital P.” Yet it was precisely this poetry with a capital P that Murray, and then, to cite the most obvious example, John Ashbery after her, found at once as invigorating as catnip and, despite its originator’s qualms, an eminently viable way for poetry to happen. It is surely a testimony to Auden’s eye for talent, whatever form that talent took, that he selected for the Yale series first Murray’s Poems and later Ashbery’s Some Trees, for both make extensive use of a poetic mode that, although he had himself invented it, he had since come to mistrust.当然，到了1946年，当他决定给莫里的手稿颁奖时，奥登已经果断地远离了他的学生在《如果在这座城市里》这样一首诗中关于复活的习语；奥登在晚年常常对他早期作品中更具梵蒂冈色彩的方面投以相当冷淡的目光，尤其对其影响感到遗憾里尔克，他觉得是他引诱他写了太多的“大写字母P的诗歌”。然而，正是这首带有大写字母P的诗歌才被默里所接受，然后，举一个最明显的例子，约翰·阿什伯里在她之后，立刻发现和卡特尼普一样振奋人心，尽管它的创始者感到不安，诗歌发生的一种非常可行的方式。这无疑证明了奥登对天赋的眼光，无论天赋是什么形式，他都选择了耶鲁大学的系列作品《第一首默里的诗》和后来的阿什伯里的《一些树》，因为这两部作品都广泛使用了一种诗歌模式，尽管他自己发明了这种模式，但后来他开始不信任。
“If Here in the City” is, I think, at once too derivative and too baffling to be classed as one of Murray’s stronger efforts, but by placing it at the head of her collection, which contains seventy-six pieces in all, Code allowed her to acknowledge the Audenesque as the portal through which she entered the poetic realms that follow. Most of the volume it inaugurates consists of shortish lyrics, of which about twenty turn the page. Book three and book seven conclude with Murray’s two longest and, in my opinion, two finest works: “An Epithalamium,” which occupies five pages, and “Orpheus. Three Eclogues,” which runs to nine.我认为《如果在这座城市里》一经推出就太离谱了，也太令人费解了，不应该被归为默里更努力的作品之一，但通过将它放在她的收藏之首，总共包含76首作品，代码让她承认奥德内斯是她进入随后诗意王国的门户。它的开篇之作大多是短小的歌词，其中大约有二十首翻了一页。第三册和第七册以穆雷最长的两部作品结束，在我看来，是两部最好的作品：《一个上层建筑》，共五页，和《俄耳甫斯》。“三支夜莺”，一共九支。
While the bleak urgency of the book’s opening salvo subliminally reflects the era in which Murray’s oeuvre was composed, one finds in her work few specific historical references. An exception to this rule is “The Coming of Strange People,” which is subtitled “Written on the day of Holland’s invasion,” allowing us to date it to May 10, 1940. But this poem, like “If Here in the City,” is concerned to view the events of history from a dauntingly wide-angled perspective. Certainly it laments the casualties of the invasion (“So many bodies flat upon the stir of spring,” it begins) and the return of “old war chanting,” and condemns the “hate” fueling the invaders, who, curiously, are never named but simply called “strange people,” as if the speaker were an anthropologist scrupulously adopting the terminology for outsiders of a tribe under scrutiny. But the poem also moves spectacularly beyond the “bewildered age” she inhabits, contrasting the chaos of the present with nature’s powers of recuperation:虽然这本书开场白的凄凉紧迫性在潜意识里反映了默里作品创作的时代，但人们在她的作品中却发现很少有具体的历史参考。这条规则的一个例外是“奇怪的人的到来”，它的副标题是“写在荷兰入侵的那天”，允许我们把它追溯到1940年5月10日。但这首诗，就像《如果在这座城市》一样，关注的是从一个令人胆怯的广角视角来看待历史事件。当然，它哀叹侵略的伤亡（“如此多的尸体平躺在春天的骚动中”，它开始）和“旧战争口号”的回归，并谴责助长侵略者的“仇恨”，奇怪的是，这些侵略者从来没有被命名，只是被简单地称为“奇怪的人”，“就好像演讲者是人类学家一样，小心翼翼地采用了被仔细审视的部落外人的术语。但这首诗也超越了她所处的“困惑时代”，将当下的混乱与大自然的休养生息的力量进行了对比：
From this land we see the valleys and the banners.
The hollow places will hold ruins for a time;
Then the sides of the mountain will green and flower,
Even women shall bear trees and know the leaves for children.
One is reminded of the attempts of Wallace Stevens to create adequate space for the soldier in his conjugations of the relationship between reality and imagination in his poetry of the war years, in particular of the mixture of human carnage and the irrepressible, exotic energies of nature intertwined in the jungle of “Asides on the Oboe” of 1940, with its “jasmine haunted forests” in which the poet hears the central man “chanting for those buried in their blood.” My guess is that Murray closely read Stevens — about the value of whose work, incidentally, Auden was deeply skeptical; and, if I’m right in this, more incidentally still, by fusing these two antithetical influences she again anticipates the processes that shaped the development of Ashbery.人们不禁想起华莱士·史蒂文斯在其战争年代的诗歌中，试图为士兵创造足够的空间，将现实与想象的关系结合起来，特别是将人类的屠杀与不可抑制的结合起来，在1940年的“双簧管上的阿西德斯”丛林中，大自然的异域能量交织在一起，在那里，诗人听到中心人物“为埋葬在他们血液中的人吟唱”。我猜默里仔细阅读了史蒂文斯关于其作品价值的文章，顺便说一句，奥登对此深表怀疑；如果我是对的，顺便说一句，通过融合这两种对立的影响，她再次预测了塑造阿什贝利发展的过程。
While Stevens tends to reach, in his meditations on the issues raised by war, toward a delicate balance between the ideal and the real, with self-conscious pointers to the paradigmatic role that poetry can play in negotiations between them, Murray’s “The Coming of Strange People” concludes with a resonant delineation of evolutionary harshness and the crisis of the moment:史蒂文斯在思考战争所引发的问题时，倾向于在理想与现实之间达成微妙的平衡，并自觉地指出诗歌在他们之间的谈判中所能起到的示范作用，默里的《奇怪的人的到来》以对进化的严酷性和当下的危机的一个共鸣的描述来结束：
Earth, there is no gentle shaping of the clay.
Time, no building in the hour.
Things come and the sea is sea without us.
All is brash and shrill, with bone to fallow on,
And bitter of mouth are we who taste the green this spring.
The gentle pathos of Wilfred Owen’s “Was it for this the clay grew tall?” is firmly set aside by the unsparing rigor of the historical consciousness these lines purvey. Things come, they don’t even fall apart, and whatever epithet we apply to the sea, from Homer’s “wine-dark” to Stevens’s “tragic-gestured,” affects the sea itself not at all. The only concession to sentiment lies in acknowledging the bitterness of the taste of the spring in May of 1940, with the bones of the dead dispersed like nutrient, lying fallow in its lap.威尔弗雷德·欧文的温柔悲怆：“难道粘土就因为这个长高了吗？“被这些诗句所传递的无情的历史意识所牢牢地撇在一边。事情来了，它们甚至都没有瓦解，不管我们用什么称呼海洋，从荷马的“酒黑”到史蒂文斯的“悲剧性的手势”，对海洋本身根本没有影响。对情感的唯一让步是承认1940年5月春天的苦涩，死者的骨头像营养物一样散开，躺在地上休耕。
“The Coming of Strange People” is the opening poem of book six, and a number of other pieces in this section explore, or reflect upon, the will to conquest. In “Ahab the Supermonomaniac” Murray succinctly sums up the corrosive emotions driving Melville’s obsessed hero: “Sought all life damned. / Pain chanted imaginings.” The three poems that follow are all set in England, which is presented by Murray as already in the throes of post-imperial diminishment, as an “island-once-kingdom.” “We were Empire and now we are dead or Mayflower” she observes in the longest of these, a line which might be said to compact into ten words Auden’s compendious diagnoses of his mother country, which culminated in his decision to follow in the footsteps of the pilgrim fathers to America, rather than collapse, as he feared he otherwise would, to what he calls in “Consider” “a classic fatigue.” It can plausibly be argued that Auden is Britain’s first post-imperial poet, and something of the historical guilt and fear of lassitude or failure that drives so much of his thirties poetry infiltrates Murray’s depictions of England too: “Then know what it is to have the sins of the father!” she exclaims in “Empire Now Dead and Mayflower” — Code presumably quarried the poem’s title from the line quoted above. “On Looking at Left Fields” (“left” here meaning “abandoned”) enjoins us to note how in “the old fields the old corn tangles,” and the “sleek weed twists and strangles,” ruining “lands” that once were “green.” In this poem, another set of three quatrains rhyming abab, Murray shifts from a sense of national inertia and inadequacy to an image of herself as a Londoner, one who knows from the inside the symptoms of the national malaise:“陌生人的到来”是第六册的开篇诗，在这一部分中，其他一些作品探索或反思征服的意志。在《超级经济狂人亚哈》中，默里简洁地总结了驱使梅尔维尔执著英雄的腐蚀性情绪：“寻找所有该死的生命。痛苦高呼想象。”接下来的三首诗都是以英国为背景的，默里将其描述为已经处于后帝国时代衰败的阵痛之中，是一个“曾经的王国”“我们曾经是帝国，现在我们已经死了，或者说是五月花，”她在其中最长的一行中观察到，这句话可以说是把奥登对祖国的简要诊断浓缩成十个字，这句话的高潮是他决定追随朝圣者祖先的足迹去美国，而不是崩溃，正如他所担心的那样，他所说的“考虑一下”“典型的疲劳”。可以合理地说，奥登是英国第一位后帝国主义诗人，他30多岁的诗歌中有一种历史上的罪恶感和对疲惫或失败的恐惧也渗透进了默里对英国的描述：“那就知道吧有父的罪是何等的！她在《帝国已死与五月花》中感叹道：“代码大概是从上面引用的诗句中找到的。”。“看左边的田野”（“左”在这里的意思是“被遗弃”）告诫我们注意在“旧的田野里，老玉米缠结在一起”，“光滑的野草缠绕着，绞死了”曾经是“绿色的土地”。在这首诗中，另一组押韵阿巴布的三首四行诗，默里从一种对国家惰性和不足的感觉转变成了一个伦敦人的形象，一个从内部知道国家不景气症状的人：
Dried leaves like lizard scales over the land
And the slow blink down to winter.
Father of shivering times, crazed by each spring’s demand,
Why would you know your daughter?
It is this London they will never know —
Something of must, stale bread and spring,
The fattened dog, the thinning child and Rotten Row.
To be born a Londoner, as I, gives meaning to the thing.
Are the “they,” one can’t help wondering, her transatlantic relations? This poem is followed by “London,” a wonderful piece of urban description that I much regret not including in my anthology London: A History in Verse. “London sits with her hands cupped,” it begins. What is the personified city waiting for? Pigeons, sparrows, a “fat-flanked mare,” and “slim weeds of ivy” animate its streets and buildings, along with Easter lilies, only for all to be suddenly obliterated by the capricious spring weather:“他们”，人们不禁要问，她的跨大西洋关系？这首诗之后是“伦敦”，这是一个很好的城市描述，我很遗憾没有包括在我的选集《伦敦：诗中的历史》。“伦敦坐在那里，双手托着，”开头写道。人格化的城市在等什么？鸽子、麻雀、一匹“肥硕的母马”和“长春藤上纤细的野草”使它的街道和建筑物充满活力，还有复活节百合花，但所有的人都突然被变化无常的春天天气抹去了：
a cool breeze speaks out of some darker street,
Clouds shuffle up with restless intrepidity, and spill
Their whole river of abundance at her feet,
The whole clean wide river, and wrap her in one river of sleet,
Her sides in one wet sheet.
As such lines demonstrate, Murray’s poetry is adept, perhaps too relentlessly for some, at making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Rhyme often plays a distinctive role in her creation of oblique angles and surprising twists, as in the chiming here of street / feet / sleet / sheet. She frequently makes superb use of off-rhyme too, as well as of variable line lengths, whose effect in her work is memorably described by Ashbery as “suggestive of waves washing up on a beach, with every so often an unusually long one, like the wave that surprises you when you’re walking by the ocean, making you run to escape it.”正如这样的诗句所证明的那样，默里的诗歌善于让陌生变得熟悉，熟悉的陌生变得陌生，也许对某些人来说太无情了。韵经常在她的斜角和令人惊讶的扭曲的创作中扮演一个独特的角色，就像这里的街道 /英尺 / 雨夹雪 / / 床单在她的创作中发挥着独特的作用。她也经常运用不押韵以及可变的线条长度，这在她的作品中的效果被阿什伯利（Ashbery）描述为“让人联想到海浪在海滩上冲刷，偶尔会有一个异常长的海浪，就像在海边散步时让你惊喜的波浪，让你跑去躲避它。”
For all their whimsy and wanderings, Murray’s poems come in carefully structured shapes and sizes; her curious swoops and zigzags develop within elastic but recognizable stanza patterns, often allowing an energizing tension between impulse and rigor to emerge. “What will the wish, what will the dance do?” inquires Auden at the end of his short poem “Orpheus” of 1937, and while not exactly a formalist, Murray shows herself insistently aware of how the dance can liberate the wish. Indeed a number of her poems proffer as an image of the maker not an inspired bard but a toiling architect. The second half of book one consists of six poems in a row that develop architectural themes as a means of foregrounding the relationship between the fluidity of the imagination and the structures that seem in opposition to its freedoms. “It is the action of water that is the nearest thing to man,” exclaim the young in the opening lines of “The Builder,” to which a “sullen cry,” which I take to be that of the builder himself, responds that there is “no time to stop in the work and the job, only time to breathe, / And breathe in your own fine sweat.” A fairly standard antithesis seems set up here, but the poem goes on to complicate it in a range of intriguing ways. Appealing as the indolent young’s resistance to work and order may seem, how far, the poem asks, can one take the romantic ideal of the imagination as formless and insatiable? “I want to wander over the hills” enthuses its Orphic speaker:尽管他们的奇思妙想和漫游，默里的诗都是精心设计的形状和大小；她奇怪的俯冲和曲折在富有弹性但可识别的诗节模式中发展，常常使冲动和严谨之间充满活力的张力显现出来。“愿望会怎样，舞蹈会做什么？奥登在他1937年的短诗《俄耳甫斯》的结尾问道，虽然并不完全是一个形式主义者，但莫里却坚持地意识到舞蹈是如何释放愿望的。事实上，她的许多诗都是作为一个创造者的形象而不是一个有灵感的吟游诗人，而是一个辛勤的建筑师。第一册的后半部分由六首诗组成，这些诗发展了建筑主题，以此来预示想象的流动性与似乎与自由相悖的结构之间的关系。“水的作用才是最接近人类的东西，”年轻人在《建筑工人》的开场白中惊呼道，“我认为这是建筑工人自己发出的一声“阴沉的哭声”回应说，“没有时间停止工作和工作，只有时间呼吸，在这里似乎建立了一个相当标准的对立面，但这首诗以一系列有趣的方式使之复杂化。尽管懒散的年轻人对工作和秩序的反抗似乎很吸引人，但这首诗问道，一个人能把想象中的浪漫理想视为无形和永不满足的吗？“我想在山上漫步”它的奥普希克的演讲者热情地说：
and down to the water,
And if there is sea I want to pack it up in my arms,
And let the blue globe of all the wide water fill my mouth
Till my jaw hangs loose, and come piling into me,
Fill up my head, my chest, and the sea-filled loins to burst in me.
The builder may be sullen, and his constructions doomed, but as the poem’s last stanza makes clear, he is more aware than the absurdly water-inflated speaker of what he is doing. “We’re building,” he explains:
towers of Babel that will crumble down before dawn,
Like the falling of water down and down to the sea,
And we’d die making towers of Babel while they tumble down to the sea.
This may not achieve quite the defiant splendor of Yeats’s “All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay”; nevertheless, the extravagant, almost parodic terms in which Murray stages this dialogue between romantic impulse and classical form indicate a high degree of self-consciousness about her own procedures, and suggest the need to move beyond the high rhetoric of Modernism toward more indeterminate and flexible styles of approach to the relationship between desire and convention.这可能无法达到叶芝所说的“一切事物都会倒下重新建造，而那些重新建造它们的人都是同性恋”的壮丽壮丽；尽管如此，奢侈，莫里在浪漫主义冲动和古典形式之间的对话中所用的几乎是模仿性的术语，表明她对自己的程序有高度的自我意识，并暗示需要超越现代主义的高调辞令，转向更不确定和灵活的方式来处理欲望和惯例之间的关系。
Murray’s conjugations of the figure of the architect in these poems connect with the overall vision that the book presents of the history of civilization and its culmination in the modern city. In the first in the series the Gothic is celebrated for its power to incorporate into its facades architecture’s seeming opposite, the “passions of night,” in the gargoyle shape of a chuckling “slippery imp” or “a fangy slit-eyed creature of no race.” A “little architect” is rocked to sleep in another that Murray — or Code — called “Lullaby,” which is about a mother and child rather than the fickle lovers presented in Auden’s poem of the same name. As in the last stanza of Auden’s love poem, Murray’s “Lullaby” delicately dreams a happy future for its addressee, imagining the future structures that she will one day build fusing as successfully as Gothic cathedrals the organic and irrational with the “dead” stone of which they are made:莫里在这些诗中对建筑师的塑造与这本书所呈现的文明史及其在现代城市中的顶峰的整体视野相联系。在这一系列的第一部分中，哥特式风格因其将建筑外观与“夜的激情”融为一体的力量而闻名，一个“小建筑师”摇摇晃晃地睡在另一个叫“摇篮曲”的“摇篮曲”里，这是一个母亲和孩子的故事，而不是奥登的同名诗中的反复无常的恋人。正如奥登爱情诗的最后一节一样，默里的“摇篮曲”巧妙地为收信人梦想着一个幸福的未来，想象着她有朝一日将建造的未来建筑与哥特式大教堂一样成功地融合在一起——有机的、非理性的与它们的“死”石是由这些石头构成的：
The grass will not be so insignificant, the stone so dead.
You will spiral up the mansions we have sown.
Drop your lids, little architect. Admit the bats of wisdom into your head.
The looping parabolas made by bats offer a useful way of figuring Murray’s poetic imagination as a whole. No doubt the kinds of wisdom it conveys may seem to some a little skittish or elusive — although she is by no means averse to accumulating series of propositions that appear to be aiming at the lapidary or epigrammatic. The short poem “Men and Women Have Meaning Only As Man and Woman” consists entirely of such propositions, but ones that manage to combine the self-evident and the unfathomable, or at the very least, unverifiable, like a miscellany of mistranslated koans or a set of philosophical exempla that one can’t quite follow:蝙蝠创造的循环抛物线提供了一个有用的方式来计算莫里的诗歌想象力作为一个整体。毫无疑问，它所传达的智慧在某些人看来似乎有点轻率或难以捉摸，尽管她并不反对积累一系列似乎是针对金石学或警句学的命题。短诗“男人和女人只有作为男人和女人才有意义”完全由这样的命题组成，但是这些命题设法将不言而喻和深不可测，或者至少是不可证实的结合起来，比如一本误译的《古兰经》杂集或一套人们无法完全遵循的哲学范例：
Men and women have meaning only as man and woman.
The moon is itself and it is lost among stars.
The days are individual, and in the passage
The nights are each sleep, but the dreams vary.
A repeated action is upon its own feet.
We who have spoken there speak here.
It is not easy to take issue with such statements; their wisdom lies in the sense they communicate of a kind of false bottom to our uses of language. Like Auden, Murray is not afraid of giving full reign to the urge to define and categorize, yet the seemingly systematic processes of assertion and illustration that inform her poems tend to register as subtly but irretrievably askew, as “makeshift,” to adopt Code’s term, despite the authoritative tones in which they are delivered. “Men and Women ... ” concludes:对这种说法提出异议并非易事；他们的智慧在于，他们向我们传达了一种虚假的语言使用底。像奥登一样，默里并不害怕充分发挥定义和分类的冲动，然而，似乎系统化的断言和说明的过程，为她的诗歌提供了信息，往往注册为微妙但不可挽回的歪斜，作为“临时”，采用代码的术语，尽管他们的权威语气交付。“男人和女人················
The timing of independent objects
Permits them to live and move and admit their space
And entity and various attitudes of life.
All things are cool in themselves and complete.
If the “cool” tone reminds one of Wittgenstein’s dispassionate chains of logic in the Tractatus, the lacunae that open up between each of the poem’s sentences suggest a mind pursuing certainties where none exist.
It is lack of completion, however, that drives her two longest pieces, “An Epithalamium” and “Orpheus. Three Eclogues,” which both explore relationships between men and women, or man and woman. “An Epithalamium” is subtitled “Or Marriage Day in a Little-Known Country / A Marriage Poem for an Age,” and is in the form of a dialogue between “The Young Women” and “The Young Men” of this little-known country. The ceremonial aspect of the epithalamium tradition is honored, up to a point, in the poem’s formal properties: the first four alternating speeches are thirteen lines long, as is the sixth, which is spoken by The Young Men; the fifth, and the concluding seventh, both spoken by The Young Women, are seventeen lines long. Perhaps, in this little-known country, this is the form taken by all epithalamiums.然而，正是由于缺乏完整性，她才创作出了两首最长的作品《阿皮卡勒姆》和《俄耳甫斯》。《三个月份牌》，都是关于男人和女人，或者男人和女人之间的关系。“一个上流社会”的副标题是“或在一个鲜为人知的国家的结婚日 / 一个时代的结婚诗”，它的形式是这个鲜为人知的国家的“青年妇女”和“青年男子”之间的对话。从某种程度上讲，这首诗的形式特征体现了上流社会传统的仪式性：前四个交替发言的长度是十三行，第六行是年轻男性所说的；第五行和第七行，都是年轻女性说的，都是十七行。也许，在这个鲜为人知的国家里，这就是所有上皮亚明所采取的形式。
The poem attempts, rather like Auden’s very early charade Paid on Both Sides, which developed out of his reading of Icelandic sagas, to use the archaic and immemorial to delineate a radically modern sensibility. Both are anatomies of late adolescence, of its fantasies and uncertainties and trembling fascination with new kinds of linguistic and empirical possibility, but while Auden’s charade harks back to the japes of a public school Junior Common Room or the rituals of Officer Training Corps, Murray’s young women and young men float free of any particular social context. In numerous passages the influence of Rilke, especially of the Duino Elegies, is strong, but not, I think, overpowering:这首诗试图用古老和远古来描绘一种极端现代的情感，就像奥登早期对双方的猜谜游戏一样，是从他对冰岛传奇的解读中发展而来的。两者都是对青春期晚期的解剖，对青春期的幻想和不确定性，以及对新的语言和经验可能性的战栗迷恋，但奥登的猜谜游戏让人回想起公立学校的初级公共休息室或军官训练队的仪式，默里笔下的年轻女性和年轻男性游离于任何特定的社会背景中。在许多段落中，里尔克的影响，尤其是杜伊诺挽歌，是很强烈的，但我认为，并不是压倒性的：
On the hill we see a child plucking flowers:
The round face of the day is seeded with infinities.
In our minds the children stamp, the strict parent frowns, the infant cowers
Behind random clusters, the flower-symbol, to smother laughter.
Compact and kneeling, we smoothe the wet grass to one side,
Learning to touch the earth with consideration,
Knowing that we must be less militant and young to stroke the things that hide.
Even the bright dew weeps from the stem at our inept and thoughtless touch.
The novelty and the clumsiness of awakening sexual consciousness are beautifully captured in such lines. The pastoral tradition, which dominates book three in Code’s arrangement, is elegantly and boldly reconfigured throughout these seven monologues, which interact with each other in an oblique but effective way, rather in the manner of the speeches by the four characters of Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (a poem subtitled a “A Baroque Eclogue”) on which he was at work during the summer that he selected Murray’s poems for the Yale prize. “An Epithalamium” is Murray’s fullest exploration of what I called in relation to “Believe Me, My Fears Are Ancient” the procreative urge. At many moments the writing turns frankly erotic: “Come, O come to us,” urge The Young Women in the final section, “so that we shall know more of the pine against the hill.” Whatever her health problems, Murray was as capable as, say, the Keats of “The Eve of St. Agnes” of imagining the coming together of lovers and their mutual transformation by this act of blending into new identities that move beyond the scope or reach of the poem: “And they are gone — ay, ages long ago / These lovers fled away into the storm,” observes Keats in his final stanza; “Lovers may touch,” “An Epithalamium” concludes, “but the marriage bond is a link without distraction.”在这样的台词中，唤醒性意识的新奇和笨拙被完美地捕捉到了。在《密码》的第三册中，田园传统在这七篇独白中被优雅而大胆地重新配置，这些独白以一种倾斜而有效的方式相互作用，而不是以奥登的《焦虑的时代》（一首诗的副标题是“巴洛克式的颂歌”）中的四个人物的演讲方式来进行今年夏天，他在为耶鲁大学奖挑选默里的诗歌。“一个上皮细胞”是莫里对我所说的关于“相信我，我的恐惧是古老的”生殖冲动的最充分的探索。很多时候，这篇文章会变得很色情：“来吧，到我们这里来，”在最后一节敦促年轻的妇女们，“这样我们就可以了解更多关于山上的松树。”不管她有什么健康问题，默里都有能力，比方说，济慈在《圣艾格尼丝前夜》中，想象恋人的相聚和他们的相互转变，通过这种行为融入超出诗歌范围或范围的新身份：“他们已经消失了，好几年前，这些恋人逃到了暴风雨中，”济慈在他的最后一节中说，“情人们“可能会接触，”一个表面文章总结道，“但婚姻纽带是一个没有分心的纽带。”
Except, of course, when one of the lovers dies. In “Orpheus. Three Eclogues,” the volume’s last poem, Murray bravely picks up the myth that Rilke had made spectacularly his own, first in “Orpheus.Eurydice. Hermes,” and then in Sonnets to Orpheus. Murray’s poem has a wider cast list, including Orpheus’s mother Calliope, Charon, who punts him across the Acheron, as well as the Beasts that Orpheus enchants and the Shades of Hades, who are both given a choric role. If “An Epithalamium” recreates the vivid pulse of dawning sexuality that animates Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Murray’s Eurydice comes to resemble the mournful knight of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” hollowed out by the failure of love, stranded, by Orpheus’s sudden change of mind, in the world of the Shades. As they proceed on the path up from Hades, Eurydice gradually recovers her sensuality and humanity, imagining, like a convalescent taking her first tottering steps out of bed, the life she is about to recover:当然，除非其中一个情人死了。在“奥菲斯”。三首歌，“本卷的最后一首诗，默里勇敢地拾起了里尔克第一次创造自己的神话”奥菲斯。尤里迪斯. 赫耳墨斯“，然后在十四行诗给俄耳甫斯。默里的诗有一个更广泛的演员名单，包括俄耳甫斯的母亲卡利奥普，卡隆，谁把他推过阿奇隆，还有奥菲斯施魔法的野兽和阴间的阴影，他们都被赋予合唱的角色。如果说《爱的爱》再现了济慈的《圣艾格尼丝前夜》中充满活力的性欲曙光的生动脉搏，那么默里的《欧律狄丝》就有点像《无慈悲的美人》中悲恸的骑士，因为爱的失败而被掏空，由于奥菲斯的突然改变，在阴影的世界里搁浅了。当他们从冥府上路时，欧律狄丝逐渐恢复了她的性欲和人性，像一个康复者一样蹒跚着走出床，想象着她即将恢复的生活：
I will lean myself to the wind and nibble the sensation,
Passionately grasp the oval bowls of wine,
Taste and tamper, have precise delight in the minutest tilt of inclination.
Much of the poem, with the exception of the choric passages, makes cleverly unobtrusive use of Murray’s favoured abab rhyme scheme, although this breaks down in the two lines that Eurydice utters as Orpheus turns, the most affecting lines, to my mind, in her entire oeuvre:
In my palms lie these two clear efforts of my eyes,
The very essence of this tormented moment.
As “An Epithalamium” found a complex but ceremonial language in which to translate The Young Women’s and The Young Men’s approach to sexual union, so this decisive moment of sundering is conveyed in a calm, uplifting, almost metaphysical image. Orpheus’s decision to turn to look at his wife and thus condemn her to return to Pluto is made no more explicable by Murray than the sudden onset of a deadly illness, while the choric summation by the Shades, which brings the poem, and the volume as a whole, to a close, returns us to the remorseless cosmic perspectives of the opening piece, “If Here in the City”:正如“一个表现主义者”发现了一种复杂但仪式性的语言，用以翻译年轻女性和年轻男性对性结合的态度，所以这个决裂的决定性时刻以一个平静、振奋、近乎形而上学的形象来传达。奥菲斯决定转向看他的妻子，并因此谴责她返回冥王星，这一点在默里看来并不比一场致命疾病的突然发作更能说明问题，而《阴影》的合唱总结，使这首诗和整本书结束，使我们回到了开篇作品中无情的宇宙观，“如果在城里的话”：
Birds and beasts, rocks and fish of the sea,
Watch how the lidless pools absorb to themselves
The improbable adventure without a ripple.
Death quietly claims Eurydice, however frantically Orpheus clutches her vanishing image, and then afterward laments her loss. The poem is clear that never again will the border between death and life prove porous: “Leave what may be the absolute of death to us, the proper dead.”死亡悄悄地夺走了欧丽迪丝，然而奥菲斯疯狂地抓住了她消失的形象，随后又为她的失去而悲伤。这首诗清楚地表明，死亡与生命之间的界限再也不会有漏洞：“把死亡的绝对性留给我们，真正的死者。”
Murray’s book seems to me a startling achievement for a poet who died at an even younger age than Keats, a month short of her twenty-fifth birthday. It is surprising, particularly after John Ashbery’s eloquent praise of her work in 2003, that she has attracted so little critical attention, by which I actually mean none: this essay is, as far as I can tell, the first ever written on her oeuvre. The improbable poetic adventures her Poems offers have slipped into oblivion, like Eurydice, almost without a ripple, although she does make cameo appearances in David Lehman’s The Oxford Book of American Poetry of 2006 and Evan Jones’s and Todd Swift’s Modern Canadian Poets of 2010. Auden ends his short foreword by recommending four pieces to a casual browser of Poems in a bookstore: “You Talk of Art,” “An Epithalamium,” “Even the Gulls of the Cool Atlantic,” and “Orpheus.” “I am confident,” he adds, “that, if he is a true judge and lover of poetry, he will neither leave the store without taking the volume with him, nor ever regret his purchase.” It can take a while to tune in to the “fluctuant,” to borrow one of her favorite adjectives, maneuvers that Murray’s poems perform, but Auden is surely right to suggest that those who make the effort will not regret it. “Admit,” as the mother advises her little architect in “Lullaby,” “the bats of wisdom into your head.”在我看来，默里的书对于一个比济慈还年轻的诗人来说是一个惊人的成就，离她25岁生日还有一个月。令人惊讶的是，尤其是在2003年约翰·阿什贝利雄辩地赞扬了她的作品之后，她却很少受到批判性的关注，而我的意思是没有。据我所知，这篇文章是有史以来第一篇写在她的作品上的文章。她的诗歌所提供的不太可能的诗意冒险已经被遗忘，就像欧律狄丝一样，几乎没有一点涟漪，尽管她确实客串出现在大卫·莱曼的《牛津美国诗集》（The Oxford Book of American Poets）和埃文·琼斯（Evan Jones）和托德·斯威夫特（Todd Swift）的2010年《现代加拿大诗人》中。奥登在简短的前言结尾向书店里的一位随意浏览诗歌的人推荐了四首诗：“你谈论艺术”、“上流社会”、“甚至是凉爽大西洋的海鸥”和“俄耳甫斯”。“我有信心，”他补充道，“如果他是一个真正的评判者和诗歌爱好者，他不会不带着书离开商店，也不会后悔自己的购买行为。”借用她最喜欢的形容词之一，默里的诗歌所表现的手法，可能需要一段时间来适应“波动”，但奥登建议那些努力的人不会后悔。“承认吧，”正如母亲在《摇篮曲》中对她的小建筑师建议的那样，“智慧的蝙蝠进入你的大脑。”
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