Part 13

Miss Lowell obtained her early education through private tuition and travel abroad. These European journeys were the background upon which much of Miss Lowell’s later work is unconsciously woven; her visits to France, Egypt, Turkey and Greece bore fruit, many years later, in the exotic colors of her verse. As a young girl, she had vague aspirations toward being a writer; but it was not until 1902, when she was twenty-eight years old, that she definitely determined to be a poet. For eight years she served a rigorous and solitary apprenticeship, reading the classics of all schools and countries, studying the technique of verse, exercising her verbal power—but never attempting to publish a single line. In 1910 her first verse was printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; two years later her first book appeared.

This volume, _A Dome of Many-colored Glass_ (1912), was a strangely unpromising first book. The subjects were as conventional as the treatment of them; the influence of Keats and Tennyson was evident; the tone was soft and sentimental, almost without a trace of personality. It was a queer prologue to the vivid _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ (1914), which marked not only an extraordinary advance but a totally new individuality. This second volume contained many distinctive poems written in the usual forms, a score of pictorial pieces illustrating Miss Lowell’s identification with the Imagists (see Preface) and, possibly most important from a technical standpoint, the first appearance in English of “polyphonic prose.” Of this extremely flexible form, which has only begun to be exploited, Miss Lowell, in an essay on John Gould Fletcher, has written, “‘Polyphonic’ means ‘many-voiced,’ and the form is so-called because it makes use of the ‘voices’ of poetry, namely: meter, _vers libre_, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It employs every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times.”

It was because of such experiments in form and technique that Miss Lowell first attracted attention and is still best known. But, beneath her preoccupation with theories and novelty of utterance, one listens to the skilled story-teller, to the designer of arabesques, to the narrator who (_vide_ such poems as “A Lady,” “Vintage” and the later “Bronze Horses”) revivifies history with creative excitement.

_Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916) brims with this contagious vitality; it is richer in variety than its predecessors, swifter in movement, surer in artistry. It is, in common with all of Miss Lowell’s work, best in its portrayal of the colors and sounds of physical rather than the reactions of emotional experience. She is, preëminently, the poet of the external world; her pictures are as “hard and clear” as the most uncompromising Imagist could desire. The colors with which her works are studded seem like bits of bright enamel; every leaf and flower has a lacquered brilliance. To compensate for the lack of personal warmth, Miss Lowell feverishly agitates all she touches; nothing remains quiescent. Whether she writes about a fruit shop, or a flower-garden in Roxbury, or a window-full of red slippers, or a string quartet, or a Japanese print—everything flashes, leaps, startles, spins and burns with an almost savage intensity; a dynamic speed dizzies one. Here motion frequently takes the place of emotion.

In _Can Grande’s Castle_ (1918), Miss Lowell achieves a broader line; the teller of stories, the bizarre decorator and the experimentalist are finally fused. The poems in this volume are only four in number—four polyphonic prose poems of almost epic length, but they are extraordinarily varied in music, sweeping in their sense of magnitude and time. _Pictures of the Floating World_ (1919) which followed is, in many ways, Miss Lowell’s most personal revelation. Although there are several pages devoted to the merely dazzling and grotesque, most of these poems are in a quieter key; a new restraint gives unsuspected overtones to stanzas that have much in common with the earlier “Patterns” where the narrative, the character and the thing observed are inextricably knit.

Besides Miss Lowell’s original poetry, she has made many studies in Japanese and Chinese poetry reflecting, even in her own work, their Oriental colors and contours. She has also written two volumes of critical essays: _Six French Poets_ (1915) and _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ (1917), both of them invaluable aids to the student of contemporary literature.

SOLITAIRE[30]

When night drifts along the streets of the city, And sifts down between the uneven roofs, My mind begins to peek and peer. It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens, And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples Amid the broken flutings of white pillars. It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair, And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses. How light and laughing my mind is, When all good folk have put out their bedroom candles, And the city is still.

MEETING-HOUSE HILL

I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon. Clear, reticent, superbly final, With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance, It dominates the weak trees, And the shot of its spire Is cool and candid, Rising into an unresisting sky. Strange meeting-house Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top. I watch the spire sweeping the sky, I am dizzy with the movement of the sky; I might be watching a mast With its royals set full Straining before a two-reef breeze. I might be sighting a tea-clipper, Tacking into the blue bay, Just back from Canton With her hold full of green and blue porcelain And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail Gazing at the white spire With dull, sea-spent eyes.

A LADY[31]

You are beautiful and faded, Like an old opera tune Played upon a harpsichord; Or like the sun-flooded silks Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes, And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing, With the pungence of sealed spice-jars. Your half-tones delight me, And I grow mad with gazing At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny, Which I cast at your feet. Gather it up from the dust That its sparkle may amuse you.

FREE FANTASIA ON JAPANESE THEMES[32]

All the afternoon there has been a chirping of birds, And the sun lies warm and still on the western sides of swollen branches, There is no wind; Even the little twigs at the ends of the branches do not move, And the needles of the pines are solid Bands of inarticulated blackness Against the blue-white sky. Still, but alert; And my heart is still and alert, Passive with sunshine, Avid of adventure. I would experience new emotions, Submit to strange enchantments, Bend to influences Bizarre, exotic, Fresh with burgeoning.

I would climb a sacred mountain, Struggle with other pilgrims up a steep path through pine-trees, Above to the smooth, treeless slopes, And prostrate myself before a painted shrine, Beating my hands upon the hot earth, Quieting my eyes upon the distant sparkle Of the faint spring sea.

I would recline upon a balcony In purple curving folds of silk, And my dress should be silvered with a pattern Of butterflies and swallows, And the black band of my obi Should flash with gold circular threads, And glitter when I moved. I would lean against the railing While you sang to me of wars Past and to come— Sang, and played the samisen. Perhaps I would beat a little hand drum In time to your singing; Perhaps I would only watch the play of light Upon the hilt of your two swords. I would sit in a covered boat, Rocking slowly to the narrow waves of a river, While above us, an arc of moving lanterns, Curved a bridge, A hiss of gold Blooming out of darkness, Rockets exploded, And died in a soft dripping of colored stars. We would float between the high trestles, And drift away from other boats, Until the rockets flared soundless, And their falling stars hung silent in the sky, Like wistaria clusters above the ancient entrance of a temple.

I would anything Rather than this cold paper; With outside, the quiet sun on the sides of burgeoning branches, And inside, only my books.

MADONNA OF THE EVENING FLOWERS[33]

All day long I have been working, Now I am tired. I call: “Where are you?” But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind. The house is very quiet, The sun shines in on your books, On your scissors and thimble just put down, But you are not there. Suddenly I am lonely: Where are you? I go about searching.

Then I see you, Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur, With a basket of roses on your arm. You are cool, like silver, And you smile. I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes, You tell me that the peonies need spraying, That the columbines have overrun all bounds, That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded. You tell me these things. But I look at you, heart of silver, White heart-flame of polished silver, Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur, And I long to kneel instantly at your feet, While all about us peal the loud, sweet _Te Deums_ of the Canterbury bells.

WIND AND SILVER

Greatly shining, The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky; And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their dragon scales As she passes over them.

_Ridgely Torrence_

(Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, November 27, 1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton University. For several years he was librarian of the Astor Library in New York City (1897-1901) and has been on several editorial staffs since then.

His first volume, _The House of a Hundred Lights_ (1900), bears the grave subtitle “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of Bidpai” and is a half-whimsical, half-searching hodge-podge of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. The influence of Omar Khayyám and Richard Hovey is obvious but not too dominant; Torrence saves himself on the very verge of sentimentality and rhetoric by a chuckle, an adroit right-about-face.

Torrence’s subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper force, a more concentrated fire. In “The Bird and the Tree” and “Eye-Witness,” he has caught something more than the colors of certain localities—particularly of the dark belt. They are as eloquent and moving as his _Granny Maumee and Other Plays_ (1917), which owe their power not only to Torrence’s gift as a poet but to his sympathy as a folk-lyrist.

THE BIRD AND THE TREE

Blackbird, blackbird in the cage, There’s something wrong to-night. Far off the sheriff’s footfall dies, The minutes crawl like last year’s flies Between the bars, and like an age The hours are long to-night.

The sky is like a heavy lid Out here beyond the door to-night. What’s that? A mutter down the street. What’s that? The sound of yells and feet For what you didn’t do or did You’ll pay the score to-night.

No use to reek with reddened sweat, No use to whimper and to sweat. They’ve got the rope; they’ve got the guns, They’ve got the courage and the guns; An’ that’s the reason why to-night No use to ask them any more. They’ll fire the answer through the door— You’re out to die to-night.

There where the lonely cross-road lies, There is no place to make replies; But silence, inch by inch, is there, And the right limb for a lynch is there; And a lean daw waits for both your eyes, Blackbird.

Perhaps you’ll meet again some place. Look for the mask upon the face; That’s the way you’ll know them there— A white mask to hide the face. And you can halt and show them there The things that they are deaf to now, And they can tell you what they meant— To wash the blood with blood. But how If you are innocent?

Blackbird singer, blackbird mute, They choked the seed you might have found. Out of a thorny field you go— For you it may be better so— And leave the sowers of the ground To eat the harvest of the fruit, Blackbird.

THE SON

(_Southern Ohio Market Town_)

I heard an old farm-wife, Selling some barley, Mingle her life with life And the name “Charley.”

Saying: “The crop’s all in, We’re about through now; Long nights will soon begin, We’re just us two now.

“Twelve bushels at sixty cents, It’s all I carried— He sickened making fence; He was to be married—

“It feels like frost was near— His hair was curly. The spring was late that year, But the harvest early.”

_Robert Frost_

Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New England, Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26, 1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where, for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The routine of study was too much for him and, determined to keep his mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in _The Independent_. But the strange soil-flavored quality which even then distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and the very magazines to which he sent poems that today are famous, rejected his verse with amazing unanimity. For twenty years Frost continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the discouraging apathy, and for twenty years the poet remained unknown.

In 1897, two years after his marriage, Frost moved his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in a final determination to achieve culture. This time he followed the cut-and-dried curriculum for two years, but at the end of that period he stopped trying to learn and started to teach. For three years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in 1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment and, after a few years’ teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children, sailed for England in September, 1912.

For the first time in his life, Frost moved in a literary world. London was a hot-bed of poets; groups merged, dissolved and separated over night; controversy and creation were in the air. Frost took his collection of poems to a publisher with few hopes, went back to the suburban town of Beaconsfield and turned to other matters. A few months later _A Boy’s Will_ (1913), his first collection, was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of the few authentic voices of modern poetry.

_A Boy’s Will_, unlike the later volumes, is frankly subjective; original in outlook and idiom in spite of certain reminiscences of Browning. Chiefly lyrical, this volume, lacking the concentrated emotion of his subsequent works, is a significant introduction to the following book, which has become a contemporary classic. Early in 1914, Frost leased a small place in Gloucestershire, his neighbors being the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson. In the spring of the same year, _North of Boston_ (1914), one of the most intensely American books ever printed, was published in England. (See Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a “book of people.” And it is more than that—it is a book of backgrounds as living and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a forgotten wood-pile left

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow, smokeless burning of decay.

_North of Boston_, like its successor, contains much of the finest poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual values, every line moves with the double force of observation and implication. The first poem in the book illustrates this power of character and symbolism. Although Frost is not arguing for anything in particular, one senses here something more than the subterranean enemies of walls. In “Mending Wall,” we see two elemental and opposed forces. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” insists the seeker after causes; “Good fences make good neighbors,” doggedly maintains the literal-minded lover of traditions. Here, beneath the whimsical turns and pungency of expression, we have the essence of nationalism versus the internationalist; the struggle between a blind responsibility and a pagan iconoclasm.

So with all of Frost’s characters. Like the worn out incompetent in “The Death of the Hired Man” (one of the finest _genre_ pictures of our time), the country boy in “Birches,” or the positive, tight-lipped old lady in “The Black Cottage,” his people are always intensified through the poet’s circumlocutory but precise psychology. They remain close to their soil. Frost’s monologs and dramatic idyls, written in a conversational blank verse, establish the connection between the vernacular and the language of literature; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is never a photographic realist. “There are,” he once said, “two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind.... To me, the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form.”

In March, 1915, Frost came back to America—to a hill outside of Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. _North of Boston_ had been published in the United States and its author, who had left the country an unknown writer, returned to find himself famous. _Mountain Interval_, containing some of Frost’s most beautiful poems (“Birches,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “The Hill Wife”), appeared in 1916. The idiom is the same as in the earlier volumes, but the notes are more varied, the convictions are stronger. The essential things are unchanged. The first poem in Frost’s first book sums it up:

They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true.

The fanciful by-play, the sly banter, so characteristic of this poet, has made his grimness far less “gray” than some of his critics are willing to admit. This elfin whimsy winks through the broad bucolic humor of “The Cow in Apple Time,” the mock pity of “The Road Not Taken,” the tenderness of “The Runaway” and the lovely apostrophe to an orchard in “Good-Bye and Keep Cold.”

Frost taught at Amherst College from 1916 to 1919, but found that his association with scholastic life took too much of his creative energy. In 1920, therefore, he bought a few acres in Vermont and devoted himself once more to the double labors of farmer and poet. Through his lyrics as well as his quasi-narratives, he has uttered (and is voicing) some of the deepest and richest notes in American poetry.

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!” We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple-orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: “_Why_ do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him, But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather He said it for himself. I see him there, Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

THE TUFT OF FLOWERS

I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees; I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

“As all must be,” I said within my heart, “Whether they work together or apart.”

But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim over night Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round, As where some flower lay withering on the ground.