_The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson_ (John Lane.)
This English poet, whose singing ceased a year ago, had a real lyric
gift, though a very slight one. The present volume is a collection of
all her poems, from the first girlish sheaf _Tares_, to _The Lamp and
the Lute_, which she was preparing for publication when she died.
Through this whole life-record her poetry ripples along as smoothly and
delicately as a meadow rill, with never a pause nor a flurry nor a
thrill. She sings prettily of everyone, from the _Last Fairy_ to William
Ernest Henley, and of everything, from _Death and Justice_ to the
_Orchard of the Moon_, but she has nothing arresting or important to say
of any of these subjects, and no keen magic of phrase to give her
warbling that intense vitality which would win for her the undying fame
prophesied by her loyal husband in his preface.
Nevertheless, her feeling is genuine, her touch light, and her tune a
quiet monotone of gentle soothing music which has a certain soft appeal.
Perhaps the secret of it is the fine quality of soul which breathes
through these numerous lyrics, a soul too reserved to tell its whole
story, and too preoccupied with the little things around and within her
to pay much attention to the thinking, fighting, ever-moving world
without.
* * * * *
A big-spirited, vital, headlong narrative poem is _The Adventures of
Young Maverick_, by Hervey White, who runs a printing press at
Woodstock, N. Y., and bravely publishes _The Wild Hawk_, his own little
magazine. The poem has as many moods as _Don Juan_, which is plainly,
though not tyrannically, its model.
The poem is long for these days--five cantos and nearly six hundred
Spenserian stanzas. Yet the most casual reader, one would think, could
scarcely find it tedious, even though the satirical passages run heavily
at times. The hero is a colt of lofty Arabian lineage, and the poem
becomes eloquently pictorial in setting forth his beauty:
Young Maverick in the upland pastures lay
Woven as in the grass, while star-like flowers,
Shaking their petals down in sweet array
Dappled his flanks with gentle breathless showers.
The thread green stems, tangled in bending bowers,
Their pollen plumes of dust closed over him,
Enwoofing through the drowse of summer hours,
The pattern of his body, head and limb;
His color of pale gold glowed as with sunshine dim.
The spirit of the West is in this poem, its freedom, spaciousness,
strong sunshine; also its careless good humor and half sardonic fun. The
race between the horse and the Mexican boy is as swift, vivid and
rhythmical as a mountain stream; and the Mexican family, even to the fat
old Gregorio, are characterized to the life, with a sympathy only too
rare among writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Certain other characterizations are equally incisive, this for example:
Sometimes I peep into a modern poet
Like Arthur Symons, vaguely beautiful,
Who loves but love, not caring who shall know it;
I wonder that he never finds it dull.
Mr. White is so profoundly a democrat, and so wholeheartedly a poet of
the broad, level average American people, that both social and artistic
theories sit very lightly upon him. He achieves beauty as by chance now
and then, because he can not help it, but always he achieves a warm
vitality, the persuasive illusion of life.
* * * * *
_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts (John Lane), is the ingenious effort
of a theorist in human nature to unroll the convolutions of the immortal
traitor's soul. And it is as ineffectual as any such effort must be to
remould characters long fixed in literary or historic tradition. In the
art of the world Judas is Judas; anyone who tries to make him over into
a pattern of misguided loyalty has his labor for his pains.
The blank verse in which the monologue is uttered is accurately measured
and sufficiently sonorous.
_H. M._
_Interpretations: A Book of First Poems_, by Zoë Akins (Mitchell
Kennerley).
The poems in this volume are creditable in texture, revealing a
conscious sense of artistic workmanship which it is a pleasure to find
in a book of first poems by a young American. A certain rhythmic
monotony may be mentioned as an impression gained from a consecutive
reading, and a prevailing twilight mood, united, in the longer poems,
with a vein of the emotionally feminine.
Two short lyrics, however, _I Am the Wind_ and _The Tragedienne_, stand
apart in isolated perfection, even as the two Greek columns in the
ruined theater at Arles; an impression recalled by the opening stanza of
_The Tragedienne_:
Upon a hill in Thessaly
Stand broken columns in a line
About a cold forgotten shrine
Beneath a moon in Thessaly.
This is the first of the monthly volumes of poetry to be issued by Mr.
Kennerley. It awakens pleasant anticipation of those to follow.
_Lyrical Poems_, By Lucy Lyttelton. (Thomas B. Mosher.)
The twilight mood also prevails in the poems of Lucy Lyttelton, although
the crest of a fine modern impulse may be traced in _A Vision_, _The
Japanese Widow_, _The Black Madonna_, and _A Song of Revolution_.
"Where is Owen Griffiths?" Broken and alone
Crushed he lies in darkness beneath Festiniog stone.
"Bring his broken body before me to the throne
For a crown.
"Oftentimes in secret in prayer he came to me,
Now to men and angels I know him openly.
I that was beside him when he came to die
Fathoms down.
"And, Evan Jones, stand forward, whose life was shut in gloom,
And a narrow grave they gave you 'twixt marble tomb and tomb.
But now the great that trod you shall give you elbow room
And renown."
These poems unite delicacy and strength. They convince us of sincerity
and intensity of vision.
_A. C. H._