_Irradiations: Sand and Spray, by John Gould Fletcher. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company._
There is considerable diversity in Mr. Fletcher’s _Irradiations_, but
one soon discovers that he has not encrimsoned himself with the standard
passions of poetry. He does not display the usual contortions of love,
hate, grief, and fear. Some persons have, therefore, found him aloof,
oversubtle, and lacking in emotional force. This intimation that Mr.
Fletcher’s art is etiolated is an admission of the reader’s
incompleteness. Vitality does not depend on subject; nor is subtlety
necessarily weakness. But the notion strangely persists that a poet must
clothe his emotions in samite and dance with them around a blood-red
fire to the plangent accompaniment of drums and trumpets.
To say that Mr. Fletcher has entwined himself with nature would unfairly
give an impression of Wordsworthian insipidity. Yet Mr. Fletcher in many
of his poems is a part of the rain, of the sand and wind, of the clouds
and sky. But he is never merely descriptive. He has the power of
conveying a mood in the terms of nature without intruding himself upon
the reader. Let me illustrate with one of the best of his poems which
has been much quoted elsewhere:
Flickering of incessant rain
On flashing pavements;
Sudden scurry of umbrellas;
Bending recurved blossoms of the storm.
The winds came clanging and clattering
From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits;
They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom,
And the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves.
Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.
Our tread-mill versifiers will shrink and mumble in the presence of Mr.
Fletcher’s clean new poetry. They who have inherited the dead mottled
skin of old poetic form with its incrustation of ancient allusions,
symbols, and yellowed figures, will not feel the alluring freshness of a
poem such as this:
It is evening, and the earth
Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl.
Afar there clink the polychrome points of the stars,
Indefatigable after all these years!
Here upon earth there is life, and then death,
Dawn, and later nightfall,
Fire, and the quenching of embers:
But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part
of the world,
If the idea fits my fancy?
Dawns of marvellous light, wakeful, sleepy, weary, dancing dawns;
You are rose petals settling through the blue of my evening;
I light my pipe to salute you,
And sit puffing smoke in the air and never say a word.
In his preface Mr. Fletcher says the use of rhyme is in its essence
barbarous; yet he himself uses it not infrequently together with such
devices as assonance, onomatopoeia, and alliteration. He is not
inconsistent, however, for he admits that rhyme used intelligently will
add to the richness of effect. It does:
The wind that drives the fine dry sand
Across the strand:
The sad wind spinning arabesques
With a wrinkled hand.
Labyrinths of shifting sand,
The dancing dunes!
I will arise and run with the sand,
And gather it greedily in my hand:
I will wriggle like a long yellow snake over the beaches.
I will lie curled up, sleeping,
And the wind shall chase me
Far inland.
My breath is the music of the mad wind;
Shrill piping, stamping of drunken feet,
The fluttering, tattered broidery flung
Over the dunes’ steep escarpments.
The fine dry sand that whistles
Down the long low beaches.
_Sand and Spray: A Sea-Symphony_ comprises the second part of Mr.
Fletcher’s volume. This symphony has much of the movement and variety of
music. In manner it resembles many of the “Irradiations,” and it is just
as well worth reading.
Certainly there will be many who will not like Mr. Fletcher’s work. Dogs
will always bark at a new fragrance.
_Japanese Lyrics, translated by Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company._
Readers of Lafcadio Hearn will recall the many translations of Japanese
_haikai_ poetry which are scattered through his writings. Those
translations have been collected in the present volume. They are
delicate whisps of thought, tantalizingly suggestive, most of them
confined to a sentence. Here are some of them:
If with my sleeve I hide the faint fair color of the dawning
sun,—
then, perhaps, in the morning, my lord will remain.
Perched upon the temple-bell, the butterfly sleeps:
Even while sleeping, its dream is of play—ah, the butterfly of the
grass!
Many insects there are that call from the dawn to evening,
Crying “I love! I love!”—but the Firefly’s silent passion,
Making its body burn, is deeper than all their longing.
Even such is my love ....
The following poem, says the editor, was written more than eleven
hundred years ago on the death of the poet’s little son:
As he is so young, he cannot know the way.
.... To the messenger of the Underworld I will give a bribe,
and entreat him, saying: “Do thou kindly take the little one upon thy
back along the road.”
Some discerning persons have asserted that “Imagism” is derived from
_haikai_ or _hokku_ poetry. We shall leave to them the pleasant futility
of discussing that theory. They may eventually discover that they are
building on the shaky premise that “Imagism” exists other than as a
clever word.
_The Winnowing Fan, by Laurance Binyon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company._
My dears, we will tie _vers libre_ in the garden. Then let us go into
the parlor where Mr. Laurence Binyon will pour tea; it will have sugar
in it. Mr. Binyon will read to you from his latest book _The Winnowing
Fan_. He is a gentleman of taste and culture who is vexed at the
Germans. He is meticulously metrical and counts his syllables. He will
say nothing unexpected.... If _vers libre_ howls in the garden, you may
throw rhymes at him.
_Mitchell Dawson._
Have You Read—?
(_In this column will be given each month a list of current
magazine articles which, as an intelligent being, you will not
want to miss._)
Shadows of Revolt, by Inez Haynes Gilmore. _The Masses_, July.
Redemption and Dostoevsky, by Rebecca West. _The New Republic_, July 12.
The State of the War, by Arthur Bullard. _The Masses_, August.
Serbia Between Battles, by John Reed. _The Metropolitan_, August.
Richard Aldington’s lucid account of the Imagists and their history in
_Greenwich Village_, July 15.
Almost any of the editorials in _Harper’s Weekly_.
Can You Read—?
(_In this column will be given each month a resume of current
cant which, as an intelligent being, you will go far to avoid._)
The reactions of the two Chestertons in _The New Witness_.
Midsummer fiction issues of _The Century_ or _Scribner’s_ or _Harper’s_.
_The Continent_ on Edgar Lee Masters’ _Spoon River Anthology_: “Each
poem is in the nature of a confession, philosophical or satirical,
telling secrets of human nature, good or bad—mostly bad. Because of its
novelty and originality the book has attracted attention far and
wide.... His attitude toward religious believers is a wrong one, and
readers may well wonder at the scarcity of sincere, sensible Christians
in Spoon River.”