_The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody_ will soon be published in
two volumes by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. Our present interest is in the
volume of poems, which are themselves an absorbing drama. Moody had a
slowly maturing mind; the vague vastness of his young dreams yielded
slowly to a man's more definite vision of the spiritual magnificence of
life. When he died at two-score years, he was just beginning to think
his problem through, to reconcile, after the manner of the great poets
of the earth, the world with God. Apparently the unwritten poems
cancelled by death would have rounded out, in art of an austere
perfection, the record of that reconciliation, for nowhere do we feel
this passion of high serenity so strongly as in the first act of an
uncompleted drama, _The Death of Eve_.
Great-minded youth must dream, and modern dreams of the meaning of life
lack the props and pillars of the old dogmatism. Vagueness, confusion
and despair are a natural inference from the seeming chaos of evil and
good, of pain and joy. Moody from the beginning took the whole scheme of
things for his province, as a truly heroic poet should; there are always
large spaces on his canvas. In his earlier poetry, both the symbolic
_Masque of Judgment_ and the shorter poems derived from present-day
subjects, we find him picturing the confusion, stating the case, so to
speak, against God. Somewhat in the terms of modern science is his
statement--the universe plunging on toward its doom of darkness and
lifelessness, divine fervor of creation lapsing, divine fervor of love
doubting, despairing of the life it made, sweeping all away with a vast
inscrutable gesture.
This seems to be the mood of the _Masque of Judgment_, a mood against
which that very human archangel, Raphael, protests in most appealing
lines. The poet broods over the earth--