Books March 1986
Getting Stoned
A review of Children of Light by Robert Stone.
Children of Light, Robert Stone’s fourth novel, takes its title from Robert Lowell’s 1944 poem of the same name.[1] This short, not particularly well-known poem—which also provided the title for Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1966)—paints a horrific picture of an American apocalypse:
Our Fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,
You planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter in a hall of mirrors,
And light is where the ancient...
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