with all its passionate pageantry of life and love. Like his own angel
he is
a truant still
While battle rages round the heart of God.
The lamps are spent at the end of judgment day,
and naked from their seats
The stars arise with lifted hands, and wait.
This conflict between love and doubt is the motive also of _Gloucester
Moors_, _The Daguerreotype_, _Old Pourquoi_--those three noblest,
perhaps, of the present-day poems--also of _The Brute_ and _The
Menagerie_, and of that fine poem manqué, the _Ode in Time of
Hesitation_. _The Fie-Bringer_ is an effort at another
theme--redemption, light after darkness. But it is not so spontaneous as
the _Masque_; though simpler, clearer, more dramatic in form, it is
more deliberate and intellectual, and not so star-lit with memorable
lines. _The Fire-Bringer_ is an expression of aspiration; the poet longs
for light, demands it, will wrest it from God's right hand like
Prometheus. But his triumph is still theory, not experience. The reader
is hardly yet convinced.
If one feels a grander motive in such poems as the one-act _Death of
Eve_ and _The Fountain_, or the less perfectly achieved _I Am the
Woman_, it is not because of the tales they tell but because of the
spirit of faith that is in them--a spirit intangible, indefinable, but
indomitable and triumphant. At last, we feel, this poet, already under
the shadow of death, sees a terrible splendid sunrise, and offers us the
glory of it in his art.
_The Fountain_ is a truly magnificent expression of spiritual triumph in
failure, and incidentally of the grandeur of Arizona, that tragic
wonderland of ancient and future gods. Those Spanish wanderers, dying in
the desert, in whose half-madness dreams and realities mingle, assume in
those stark spaces the stature of universal humanity, contending to the
last against relentless fate. In the two versions of _The Death of Eve_,
both narrative and dramatic, one feels also this wild, fierce triumph,
this faith in the glory of life. Especially in the dramatic fragment, by
its sureness of touch and simple austerity of form, and by the majesty
of its figure of the aged Eve, Moody's art reached its most heroic
height. We have here the beginning of great things.
The spirit of this poet may be commended to those facile bards who lift
up their voices between the feast and the cigars, whose muses dance to
every vague emotion and strike their flimsy lutes for every
light-o'-love. Here was one who went to his desk as to an altar,
resolved that the fire he lit, the sacrifice he offered, should be
perfect and complete. He would burn out his heart like a taper that the
world might possess a living light. He would tell once more the grandeur
of life; he would sing the immortal song.
That such devotion is easy of attainment in this clamorous age who can
believe? Poetry like some of Moody's, poetry of a high structural
simplicity, strict and bare in form, pure and austere in ornament,
implies a grappling with giants and wrestling with angels; it is not to
be achieved without deep living and high thinking, without intense
persistent intellectual and spiritual struggle.
_H. M._