Part 6

But, at a stroke, a breath, After the fear of death, Or bent beneath a load; Yes, ragged in the dress, And houseless on the road, I might surprise you there. Yes: who of us shall say When you will come, or where? Ask children at their play, The leaves upon the tree, The ships upon the sea, Or old men who survived, And lived, and loved, and wived. Ask sorrow to confess Your sweet improvidence, And prodigal expense And cold economy, Ah, lovely happiness!

_Ernest Rhys_

HELEN IS ILL

When she is ill my laughter cowers; An exile with a broken rhyme, My head upon the breast of time, I hear the heart-beat of the hours; I close my eyes without a sigh; The vision of her flutters by As glints the light of Mary's eyes Upon the lakes in Paradise.

I seem to reach an olden town And enter at the sunset gate; And as the streets I hurry down, I find the men are all elate, As if an angel of the Lord Had passed with dearest word and nod, Remembered like a yearning chord Of songs the people sing to God; I come upon the sunrise gate-- As silent as her listless room-- There seven beggers sing and wait And this the song that breaks the gloom:

God a 'mercy is most kind; She the fairest passed this way; We the lowest were not blind; God a 'mercy bless the day.

_Roscoe W. Brink_

VERSES, TRANSLATIONS, AND REFLECTIONS FROM "THE ANTHOLOGY"

HERMES OF THE WAYS

The hard sand breaks, And the grains of it Are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it, The wind, Playing on the wide shore, Piles little ridges, And the great waves Break over it.

But more than the many-foamed ways Of the sea, I know him Of the triple path-ways, Hermes, Who awaiteth.

Dubious, Facing three ways, Welcoming wayfarers, He whom the sea-orchard Shelters from the west, From the east Weathers sea-wind; Fronts the great dunes.

Wind rushes Over the dunes, And the coarse, salt-crusted grass Answers.

Heu, It whips round my ankles!

II

Small is This white stream, Flowing below ground From the poplar-shaded hill, But the water is sweet.

Apples on the small trees Are hard, Too small, Too late ripened By a desperate sun That struggles through sea-mist.

The boughs of the trees Are twisted By many bafflings; Twisted are The small-leafed boughs.

But the shadow of them Is not the shadow of the mast head Nor of the torn sails.

Hermes, Hermes, The great sea foamed, Gnashed its teeth about me; But you have waited, Where sea-grass tangles with Shore-grass.

_H. D._

PRIAPUS

_Keeper-of-Orchards_

I saw the first pear As it fell. The honey-seeking, golden-banded, The yellow swarm Was not more fleet than I, (Spare us from loveliness!) And I fell prostrate, Crying, Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms; Spare us the beauty Of fruit-trees!

The honey-seeking Paused not, The air thundered their song, And I alone was prostrate.

O rough-hewn God of the orchard, I bring thee an offering; Do thou, alone unbeautiful (Son of the god), Spare us from loveliness.

The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering.

_H. D._

EPIGRAM

(_After the Greek_)

The golden one is gone from the banquets; She, beloved of Atimetus, The swallow, the bright Homonoea: Gone the dear chatterer; Death succeeds Atimetus.

_H. D._, "_Imagiste_."

EDITORIAL COMMENT

STATUS RERUM

_London, December 10, 1912_

The state of things here in London is, as I see it, as follows:

I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study. Mr. Yeats' work is already a recognized classic and is part of the required reading in the Sorbonne. There is no need of proclaiming him to the American public.

As to his English contemporaries, they are food, sometimes very good food, for anthologies. There are a number of men who have written a poem, or several poems, worth knowing and remembering, but they do not much concern the young artist studying the art of poetry.

The important work of the last twenty-five years has been done in Paris. This work is little likely to gain a large audience in either America or England, because of its tone and content. There has been no "man with a message," but the work has been excellent and the method worthy of our emulation. No other body of poets having so little necessity to speak could have spoken so well as these modern Parisians and Flemings.

There has been some imitation here of their manner and content. Any donkey can imitate a man's manner. There has been little serious consideration of their _method_. It requires an artist to analyze and apply a method.

Among the men of thirty here, Padraic Colum is the one whom we call most certainly a poet, albeit he has written very little verse--and but a small part of that is worthy of notice. He is fairly unconscious of such words as "aesthetics," "technique" and "method." He is at his best in _Garadh_, a translation from the Gaelic, beginning:

O woman, shapely as a swan, On your account I shall not die. The men you've slain--a trivial clan-- Were less than I:

and in _A Drover_. He is bad whenever he shows a trace of reading. I quote the opening of _A Drover_, as I think it shows "all Colum" better than any passage he has written. I think no English-speaking writer now living has had the luck to get so much of himself into twelve lines.

To Meath of the pastures, From wet hills by the sea, Through Leitrim and Longford Go my cattle and me.

I hear in the darkness Their slipping and breathing. I name them the bye-ways They're to pass without heeding.

Then the wet, winding roads, Brown bogs with black water; And my thoughts on white ships And the King o' Spain's daughter.

I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than with any man in London. Mr. Hueffer's beliefs about the art may be best explained by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats.

Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour and associations which hang near the words. "Works of art beget works of art." He has much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all "association" for the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is objective. This school tends to lapse into description. The other tends to lapse into sentiment.

Mr. Yeats' method is, to my way of thinking, very dangerous, for although he is the greatest of living poets who use English, and though he has sung some of the moods of life immortally, his art has not broadened much in scope during the past decade. His gifts to English art are mostly negative; i. e., he has stripped English poetry of many of its faults. His "followers" have come to nothing. Neither Synge, Lady Gregory nor Colum can be called his followers, though he had much to do with bringing them forth, yet nearly every man who writes English verse seriously is in some way indebted to him.

Mr. Hueffer has rarely "come off." His touch is so light and his attitude so easy that there seems little likelihood of his ever being taken seriously by anyone save a few specialists and a few of his intimates. His last leaflet, _High Germany_, contains, however, three poems from which one may learn his quality. They are not Victorian. I do not expect many people to understand why I praise them. They are _The Starling_, _In the Little Old Market-Place_ and _To All the Dead_.

The youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a school is that of the _Imagistes_. To belong to a school does not in the least mean that one writes poetry to a theory. One writes poetry when, where, because, and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good; when they prefer such of their verses as have certain qualities to such of their verses as do not have them.

Space forbids me to set forth the program of the _Imagistes_ at length, but one of their watchwords is Precision, and they are in opposition to the numerous and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and interminable effusions, and who seem to think that a man can write a good long poem before he learns to write a good short one, or even before he learns to produce a good single line.

Among the very young men, there seems to be a gleam of hope in the work of Richard Aldington, but it is too early to make predictions.

There are a number of men whose names are too well known for it to seem necessary to tell them over. America has already found their work in volumes or anthologies. Hardy, Kipling, Maurice Hewlett, Binyon, Robert Bridges, Sturge Moore, Henry Newbolt, McKail, Masefield, who has had the latest cry; Abercrombie, with passionate defenders, and Rupert Brooke, recently come down from Cambridge.

There are men also, who are little known to the general public, but who contribute liberally to the "charm" or the "atmosphere" of London: Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the grandest of old men, the last of the great Victorians; great by reason of his double sonnet, beginning--

He who has once been happy is for aye Out of destruction's reach;

Ernest Rhys, weary with much editing and hack work, to whom we owe gold digged in Wales, translations, transcripts, and poems of his own, among them the fine one to Dagonet; Victor Plarr, one of the "old" Rhymers' Club, a friend of Dowson and of Lionel Johnson. His volume, _In The Dorian Mood_, has been half forgotten, but not his verses _Epitaphium Citharistriae_. One would also name the Provost of Oriel, not for original work, but for his very beautiful translations from Dante.

In fact one might name nearly a hundred writers who have given pleasure with this or that matter in rhyme. But it is one thing to take pleasure in a man's work and another to respect him as a great artist.

_Ezra Pound_

REVIEWS

_The Lyric Year_, Mr. Kennerley's new annual, contains among its hundred contributions nearly a score of live poems, among which a few excite the kind of keen emotion which only art of real distinction can arouse.

Among the live poems the present reviewer would count none of the prize-winners, not even Mr. Sterling's, the best of the three, whose rather stiff formalities in praise of Browning are, however, lit now and then by shining lines, as--

Drew as a bubble from old infamies.... The shy and many-colored soul of man.

The other two prize-poems must have been measured by some academic foot-rule dug up from the eighteenth century. Orrick Johns' _Second Avenue_ is a _Grays Elegy_ essay of prosy moralizing, without a finely poetic line in it, or any originality of meaning or cadence. And the second prize went to an ode still more hopelessly academic. Indeed, _To a Thrush_, by Thomas Augustine Daly, is one of the most stilted poems in the volume, a far-away echo of echoes, full of the approved "poetic" words--_throstle_, _pregnant_, _vernal_, _cerulean_, _teen_, _chrysmal_, even _paraclete_--and quite guiltless of inspiration.

But one need not linger with these. As we face the other way one poem outranks the rest and ennobles the book. This is _The Renascence_, said to be by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, according to the editor, is only twenty years old. This poem is the daring flight of a wide-winged imagination, and the art of it, though not faultless, is strong enough to carry us through keen emotions of joy and agony to a climax of spiritual serenity. Though marred by the last twelve lines, which should be struck out for stating the thesis too explicitly, this poem arouses high hopes of its youthful author.

Among the other live poems--trees, saplings or flowers--are various species. _Kisa-Gotami_, by Arthur Davison Ficke, tells its familiar story of the Buddha in stately cadences which sustain the beauty of the tale. _Jetsam_, a "_Titanic_" elegy by Herman Montagu Donner, carries the dread and dangerous subject without violating its terrors and sanctities with false sentiment or light rhythm. Ridgeley Torrence's _Ritual for a Funeral_ is less sure of its ground, sometimes escaping into vapors, but on the whole noble in feeling and flute-like in cadence. Mrs. Conkling's bird ode has now and then an airy delicacy, and Edith Wyatt's _City Swallow_ gives the emotion of flight above the roofs and smoke of a modern town.

Of the shorter poems who could ignore Harry Kemp's noble lyric dialogue, _I Sing the Battle_; _The Forgotten Soul_ by Margaret Widdemer, _Selma_, by Willard H. Wright; _Comrades_ by Fannie Stearns Davis, or Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's tribute to O. Henry, a more vital elegy than Mr. Sterling's? These are all simple and sincere--straight modern talk which rises into song without the aid of worn-out phrases. _Paternity_, by William Rose Benét, _To My Vagrant Love_, by Elouise Briton, and _Dedication_, by Pauline Florence Brower, are delicate expressions of intimate emotion; and _Martin_, by Joyce Kilmer, touches with grace a lighter subject.

To have gathered such as these together is perhaps enough, but more may be reasonably demanded. As a whole the collection, like the prizes, is too academic; Georgian and Victorian standards are too much in evidence. The ambition of _The Lyric Year_ is to be "an annual Salon of American poetry;" to this end poets and their publishers are invited to contribute gratis the best poems of the year, without hope of reward other than the three prizes. That so many responded to the call, freely submitting their works to anonymous judges, shows how eager is the hitherto unfriended American muse to seize any helping hand.

However, if this annual is to speak with any authority as a Salon, it should take a few lessons from art exhibitions. Mr. Earle's position as donor, editor and judge, is as if Mr. Carnegie should act as hanging committee at the Pittsburg show, and help select the prize-winners. And Messrs. Earle, Braithwaite and Wheeler, this year's jury of awards, are not, even though all have written verse, poets of recognized distinction in the sense that Messrs. Chase, Alexander, Hassam, Duveneck, and other jurymen in our various American Salons, are distinguished painters.

In these facts lie the present weaknesses of _The Lyric Year_. However, the remedy for them is easy and may be applied in future issues. Meantime the venture is to be welcomed; at last someone, somewhere, is trying to do something for the encouragement of the art in America. _Poetry_, which is embarked in the same adventure, rejoices in companionship.

_H. M._

* * * * *

Already many books of verses come to us, of which a few are poetry. Sometimes the poetry is an aspiration rather than an achievement; but in spite of crude materials and imperfect artistry one may feel the beat of wings and hear the song. Again one searches in vain for the magic touch, even though the author has interesting things to say in creditable and more or less persuasive rhymed eloquence.

Of recent arrivals Mr. John Hall Wheelock has the most searching vision and appealing voice. In _The Human Fantasy_ (Sherman, French & Co.) his subject is New York, typified in the pathetic little love-affair of two young starvelings, which takes its course through a stirring, exacting milieu to a renunciation that leaves the essential sanctities intact. The poet looks through the slang and shoddy of the lovers, and the dust and glare of the city, to the divine power of passion in both. In _The Beloved Adventure_ the emotion is less poignant; or, rather, the poet has included many indifferent pieces which obscure the quality of finer lyrics. More rigorous technique and resolute use of the waste-basket would make more apparent the fact that we have here a true poet, one with a singing voice, and a heart deeply moved by essential spiritual beauty in the common manifestations of human character. At his best he writes with immense concentration and unflagging vigor; and his hearty young appetite for life in all its manifestations helps him to transmute the repellant discords of the modern town into harmony. The fantasy of _Love in a City_ is a "true thing" and a vital.

Mr. Hermann Hagedorn is also a true poet, capable of lyric rapture, but sometimes, when he seems least aware, his muse escapes him. _The Infidel_, the initial poem of his _Poems and Ballads_ (Houghton Mifflin Co.), recalls his _Woman of Corinth_, and others in this book remind one of this and of his Harvard class poem, _The Troop of the Guard_, in that the words do not, like colored sands, dance inevitably into the absolute shape determined by the wizardry of sound. He is still somewhat hampered by the New England manner, a trend toward an external formalism not dependent on interior necessity. This influence makes for academic and lifeless work, and it must be deeply rooted since it casts its chill also over the Boston school of painters.

But now and then Mr. Hagedorn frees himself; perhaps in the end he may escape altogether. In such poems as _Song_, _Doors_, _Broadway_, _Discovery_, _The Wood-Gatherer_, _The Crier in the Night_ and _A Chant on the Terrible Highway_, we feel that he begins to speak for himself, to sing with his own voice. Such poems are a challenging note that should arrest the attention of all seekers after sincere poetic expression.

Mr. Percy MacKaye, in _Uriel and Other Poems_ (Houghton Mifflin Co.), shows also the Boston influence, but perhaps it is difficult to escape the academic note in such poems for occasions as these. With fluent eloquence and a ready command of verse forms he celebrates dead poets, addresses noted living persons, and contributes to a number of ceremonial observances. The poems in which he is most freely lyric are perhaps _In the Bohemian Redwoods_ and _To the Fire-Bringer_, the shorter of his elegies in honor of Moody, his friend.

In two dramatic poems, _The Tragedy of Etarre_, by Rhys Carpenter (Sturgis & Walton Co.), and _Gabriel, a Pageant of Vigil_, by Mrs. Isabelle Howe Fiske (Mosher), the academic note is confidently insisted on. The former shows the more promise of ultimate freedom. It is an Arthurian venture of which the prologue is the strongest part. In firm-knit iambics Mr. Carpenter strikes out many effective lines and telling situations. Indeed, they almost prompt the profane suggestion that, simplified and compressed, they might yield a psychological libretto for some "advanced" composer.

Mrs. Fiske's venture is toward heaven itself; but her numerous archangels are of the earth earthy.

In _The Unconquered Air and Other Poems_ (Houghton Mifflin Co.), Mrs. Florence Earle Coates shows not inspiration but wide and humane sympathies. Her verse is typical of much which has enough popular appeal and educative value to be printed extensively in the magazines; verse in which subjects of modern interest and human sentiment are expressed in the kind of rhymed eloquence which passes for poetry with the great majority.

These poets may claim the justification of illustrious precedent. The typical poem of this class in America, the most famous verse rhapsody which stops short of lyric rapture, is Lowell's _Commemoration Ode_.

NOTES

Our poets this month play divers instruments. The audience may listen to H. D.'s flute, the 'cello of Mr. Rhys, the big bass drum of Mr. Lindsay, and so on through the orchestra, fitting each poet to his special strain. Some of these performers are well known, others perhaps will be.

Mr. Ernest Rhys is of Welsh descent. In 1888-9 he lectured in America, and afterward returned to London, where he has published _A London Rose_, Arthurian plays and poems, and Welsh ballads, and edited _Everyman's Library_.

Mr. Madison Cawein, the well-known Kentucky poet resident in Louisville, scarcely needs an introductory word. His is landscape poetry chiefly, but sometimes, as in Wordsworth, figures blend with the scene and become a part of nature. A volume of his own selections from his various books has recently been published by The MacMillan Company.

Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay is the vagabond poet who loves to tramp through untravelled country districts without a cent in his pocket, exchanging "rhymes for bread" at farmers' hearths. The magazines have published engaging articles by him, but in verse he has been usually his own publisher as yet.

"H. D., _Imagiste_," is an American lady resident abroad, whose identity is unknown to the editor. Her sketches from the Greek are not offered as exact translations, or as in any sense finalities, but as experiments in delicate and elusive cadences, which attain sometimes a haunting beauty.

Mr. Kendall Banning is an editor and writer of songs. "The Love Songs of the Open Road," with music by Lena Branscord, will soon be published by Arthur Schmidt of Boston.

Mrs. Anita Fitch of New York has contributed poems to various magazines.

The February number of POETRY will be devoted to the work of two poets, Messrs. Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner.

BOOKS RECEIVED

_The Lyric Year._ Mitchell Kennerley. _Poems and Ballads_, by Hermann Hagedorn. Houghton Mifflin Co. _Shadows of the Flowers_, by T. B. Aldrich. Houghton Mifflin Co. _Poems and Plays_, by William Vaughn Moody. Houghton Mifflin Co. _Nimrod_, by Francis Rolt-Wheeler. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard. _The Shadow Garden and Other Plays_, by Madison Cawein. G. P. Putman's Sons. _Via Lucis_, by Alice Harper. M. E. Church South, Nashville, Tenn. _Songs of Courage and Other Poems_, by Bertha F. Gordon. The Baker & Taylor Co. _Narrative Lyrics_, by Edward Lucas White. G. P. Putnam's Sons. _The Dance of Dinwiddie_, by Marshall Moreton. Stewart & Kidd Co. _The Three Visions and Other Poems_, by John A. Johnson. Stewart & Kidd Co. _Hands Across The Equator_, by Alfred Ernest Keet. Privately printed. _Songs Under Open Skies_, by M. Jay Flannery. Stewart & Kidd Co. _Denys Of Auxerre_, by James Barton. Christophers, London.

_Songs in Many Moods_, by Charles Washburn Nichols. L. H. Blackmer Press. _The Lord's Prayer._ A Sonnet Sequence by Francis Howard Williams. George W. Jacobs & Co. _The Buccaneers_, by Don C. Seitz. Harper & Bros. _The Tale of a Round-House_, by John Masefield. The MacMillan Co. _XXXIII Love Sonnets_, by Florence Brooks. John Marone. _The Poems of Ida Ahlborn Weeks._ Published By Her Friends, Sabula, Iowa. _The Poems of LeRoy Titus Weeks._ Published by the author. _Ripostes_, by Ezra Pound. Stephen Swift. _The Spinning Woman of the Sky_, by Alice Corbin. The Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co. _The Irish Poems of Alfred Perceval Graves._ Maunsel & Co. _Welsh Poetry Old and New, in English Verse_, by Alfred Perceval Graves. Longmans, Green & Co.

Poetry VOL. I A Magazine of Verse NO. 5

FEBRUARY, 1913

POEMS BY ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

SWINBURNE, AN ELEGY

I