The poet would have the reader imagine a time when "bombers ... will drop wreaths of roses down," when "doves will nest in guns' throats." The joyous dance of peace and innocence has finally begun, "without hate, without fear." Even the potentially sobering act of meting out justice to war criminals is sublimated into the act of hanging them in effigy. All feelings and deeds of violence, it would seem, have disappeared; goodness and mercy appear to have inherited the earth.

The neat, crisp rhythm, the simple and perfect rhyme, the monosyllables, the easy syntax, and the plain and familiar images--all reinforce the sense of the honest, innocent, and youthful joy of this fantasy. And then, quite matter-of-factly, comes the jolt: "new men plot a new war." Unseen and unsuspected, men plan new conflicts all over again. This last line, ironically the final statement of the fantasy, destroys the superficial picture of peace and innocence drawn earlier. The emphatic suggestion is that the state of youth, like joy and innocence, is in fact a state of naiveté. By punctuating his poem with this final and unrhymed line, Jeffers points up the vulnerability of the "happy children" who rejoice complacently and unsuspectingly in the peace, and the brutality of those "new men" who "plot a new war."

The inhumanist positions himself as detached observer; he sides with neither the dancers nor the plotters. He can see both with equal clarity, and he makes it all appear somehow inevitable. In a sense, "Fantasy" is a poem more brutal for having seemed at first so pleasant. One might have anticipated this harsh view from Herman Melville or Emily Dickinson, whose antiromantic bitterness Jeffers shared. (Indeed, Jeffers forewarns the reader in "Miching Mallecho" that "the boys have memories"; that very likely they could be their fathers' sons, and move into war as did the "old gentlemen.")

That "Fantasy" is so typical of Jeffers' work in The Double Axe is perhaps all the more reason to question the judgment of Random House in asking Jeffers to delete this poem. The publisher's letters to the poet, presented in Chapter 3, may simply indicate disapproval of Jeffers' linking Roosevelt with Hitler and Guy Fawkes. If this is the case, an engaging and well-made poem, set in an American tradition of antiromanticism, has been sacrificed for partisan opinion. This poem, one of the best of those excised, is probably better--in terms of form and effect--than most of the poems left in The Double Axe.