BOOK III

POEMS AND PHANTASIES

A TRIPTYCH: First Panel: The Hill 140 II. Second and Centre Panel: The Tower 146 III. Third Panel: The Tree 150

FOUR SONGS FROM "THE PRINCE OF ORMUZ": I. The Prince of Ormuz sings to Badoura 154 II. The Song of the Princess Beside the Fountain 155 III. The Song of the Prince in Disguise 156 IV. The Princess Badoura's Last Song to her Lover 157

THE GIFT OF SONG 160

FRAGMENTS FROM "ORESTES": I. Warning Unheeded 164 II. Orestes to the Furies 167

BLACK SONGS: I. At Braydon 170 II. Midday on the Edge of the Downs 172 III. In Dorsetshire 173

MAN'S ANACREONTIC 176

THE BLACKBIRD 179

CHANGE 180

TRANSFIGURATION 181

PLAINT OF PIERROT ILL-USED 183

GIRL'S SONG FROM "THE TAILOR" 188

LAST SONG IN AN OPERA 190

DANAË: MYSTERY IN EIGHT POEMS 191

THE ECSTASY 199

THE WATER-LILY 201

DEEM YOU THE ROSES 202

THE PASSION 203

LAST WORDS 206

My thanks are due to the editor of the _Times_ and of the _Nation_, to the editors of the _Palatine Review_, and to Messrs. Blackwell, Oxford, the publishers of "Oxford Poetry, 1915," and "Oxford Poetry, 1916," for permission to reprint certain of these poems.

R. M. B. N. 1917.

INTRODUCTION

1. _Of the nature of the poet_:

"We are (often) so impressed by the power of poetry that we think of it as something made by a wonderful and unusual person: we do not realize the fact that all the wonder and marvel is in our own brains, that the poet is ourselves. He speaks our language better than we do merely because he is more skilful with it than we are; his skill is part of our skill, his power of our power; generations of English-speaking men and women have made us sensible to these things, and our sensibility comes from the same source that the poet's power of stimulating it comes from. Given a little more sensitiveness to external stimuli, a little more power of associating ideas, a co-ordination of the functions of expression somewhat more apt, a sense of rhythm somewhat keener than the average--given these things we should be poets, too, even as he is.... _He is one of us._"

2. _Of what English poetry consists_:

"English poetry is not a rhythm of sound, but a rhythm of ideas, and the flow of attention-stresses (_i.e._, varying qualities of words and cadence) which determines its beauty is inseparably connected with the thought; for each of them is a judgment of identity, or a judgment of relation, or an expression of relation, and not a thing of mere empty sound.... He who would think of it as a pleasing arrangement of vocal sounds has missed all chance of ever understanding its meaning. There awaits him only the barren generalities of a foreign prosody, tedious, pedantic, fruitless. And he will flounder ceaselessly amid the scattered timbers of its iambuses, spondees, dactyls, tribrachs, never reaching the firm ground of truth."

"AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF ENGLISH POETRY,"[1] _by_ MARK LIDDELL.

[1] _Published by Grant Richards (1902). This remarkable book, establishing English poetry as a thing governed from within by its own necessities, and not by rules of æsthetics imposed on it from without, formulates principles which, unperceived, have governed English poetry from the earliest times, which find their greatest exemplar in Shakespeare, and which, though beginning to be realized by the less pedantic of the moderns, are in its pages for the first time lucidly expounded and--such is their adequacy--can, in the end, only be regarded as indubitably proven._--R. M. B. N., 1917.

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