The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The weeping of ancient women
Who grieved without rebellion.
The lake falls over the shore
Like tears on their curven bosoms.
Here is languid, luxurious wailing;
The wailing of kings’ daughters.
So do we ever cry,
A soft, unmutinous crying,
When we know ourselves each a princess
Locked fast within her tower.
The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The fertile tears of women
That water the dreams of men.
_John Gould Fletcher_
John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, January 3,
1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts)
and Harvard (1903-7) and, after spending several years in
Massachusetts, moved to England, where, except for brief visits to
the United States, he has lived ever since.
In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which he has
referred to as “his literary wild oats,” five small collections of
experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years later,
Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and far more
arresting poet with _Irradiations—Sand and Spray_ (1915). This
volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; imagination riots through
it, even though it is often a bloodless and bodiless imagination. It
is crowded—even overcrowded—with æsthetic subtleties, a sort of
brilliant and haphazard series of improvisations.
In the following book, _Goblins and Pagodas_ (1916), Fletcher
carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates him;
the ambitious set of eleven “color symphonies” is an elaborate
design in which the tone as well as the thought is summoned by
color-associations, sometimes closely related, sometimes
far-fetched, “It contains,” says Conrad Aiken in his appreciative
chapter on Fletcher in _Scepticisms_, “little of the emotion which
relates to the daily life of men and women.... It is a sort of
absolute poetry, a poetry of detached waver and brilliance, a
beautiful flowering of language alone—a parthenogenesis, as if
language were fertilized by itself rather than by thought or
feeling. Remove the magic of phrase and sound and there is nothing
left: no thread of continuity, no thought, no story, no emotion. But
the magic of phrase and sound is powerful, and it takes one into a
fantastic world.”
Meanwhile, Fletcher has been developing. After having appeared in
the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths rather than
surfaces. Beginning with his majestic “Lincoln,” his work has had a
closer relation to humanity; a moving mysticism speaks from _The
Tree of Life_ (1918), the more obviously native _Granite and
Breakers_ (1921) and the later uncollected poems. Although the
unconscious too often dictates Fletcher’s fantasies, a calm music
dominates his shorter poems, a grave and subdued lyricism moves and
enriches them.