Throughout his career Eberhart has written essentially two kinds of poem. One is the lyric that assigns symbolic values to images and explores the implications thus activated. In "New Hampshire, February," for example, two frozen wasps are brought indoors. As the speaker breathes on them, they come to life. They "withdraw to ice" again when he stops. He feels like God…. But one wasp blunders onto the kitchen floor and the speaker, equally by accident, steps on it:

             And so the other is still my pet.
             The moral of this is plain.
             But I will shirk it.
             You will not like it. And
             God does not live to explain….

Usually the success of such poems lies more in the imaginative materials than in the performance the poem makes. But at his best Eberhart's imagination freshly expresses the difficult complexity of the human situation in general. In general—for...