have the hard ring, the thick-packed consonantal beauty of stirring
Greek.
_Dauber_ will have value to American poetry-readers if only from its
mere power of revealing that poetry is not alone the mellow lin-lan-lone
of evening bells, though it be that also, but may have music of
innumerable kinds.
_Biography_, the next poem in the book, sings with a different voice and
sees from a different point of view, the difficulty of re-creating in
expression--here expression through words, not through colors--
This many-pictured world of many passions.
_Biography_, too, rises from the invisible root of friendship and bears
with wonderfully vivid arborescence an appreciative tale of the fine
contribution of different companionships to a life.
Among the two-score shorter lyrics of the collection are songs of the
sea or of the country-side; chants of coast-town bells and ports, marine
ballads, and love-poems. This is, however, the loosest entitling of
their kinds; nothing but the work itself in its entirety, can ever tell
the actual subject of any true poem. Of these kinds it is not to the
marine ballads that one turns back again and again, not to the story of
"Spanish Waters" nor to any of the jingling-gold, the clinking-glass,
the treasure-wreck verses of the book. Their tunes are spirited, but not
a tenth as spirited as those of "The Pirates of Penzance." Indeed, to
the conventionally villainous among fictive sea-faring persons of song,
Gilbert and Sullivan seem to have done something that cannot now ever be
undone.
The poems in the volume one does turn back to again and again are those
with the great singing tones, that pour forth with originality, with
inexpressible free grace and native power. Again and again you will read
_A Creed_, _C. L. M._, _Born for Nought Else_, _Roadways_, _Truth_, _The
Wild Duck_, _Her Heart_, and--
But at the falling of the tide
The golden birds still sing and gleam.
The Atlanteans have not died,
Immortal things still give us dream.
The dream that fires man's heart to make,
To build, to do, to sing or say
A beauty Death can never take,
An Adam from the crumbled clay.
Wonderful, wonderful it is that in the hearing of our own generation,
one great voice after another has called and sung to the world from the
midst of the sea-mists of England. From the poetry of Swinburne, of
Rudyard Kipling, of John Masefield immortal things still give us dream.
Among the poems of this new book, more than one appear as incarnations
of the beauty Death can never take. Of these, perhaps, none is more
characteristic of the poet, nor will any more fittingly evince his
volume's quality than _Truth_.
Man with his burning soul
Has but an hour of breath
To build a ship of Truth
In which his soul may sail,
Sail on the sea of death.
For death takes toll
Of beauty, courage, youth,
Of all but Truth.
Life's city ways are dark,
Men mutter by, the wells
Of the great waters moan.
O death, O sea, O tide,
The waters moan like bells.
No light, no mark,
The soul goes out alone
On seas unknown.
Stripped of all purple robes,
Stripped of all golden lies,
I will not be afraid.
Truth will preserve through death;
Perhaps the stars will rise,
The stars like globes.
The ship my striving made
May see night fade.
_Edith Wyatt_
_Présences_, par P. J. Jouve: Georges Crès, Paris.
I take pleasure in welcoming, in Monsieur Jouve, a contemporary. He
writes the new jargon and I have not the slightest doubt that he is a
poet.
Whatever may be said against automobiles and aeroplanes and the
modernist way of speaking of them, and however much one may argue that
this new sort of work is mannered, and that its style will pass, still
it is indisputable that the vitality of the time exists in such work.
Here is a book that you can read without being dead sure of what you
will find on the next page, or at the end of the next couplet. There is
no doubt that M. Jouve sees with his own eyes and feels with his own
nerves. Nothing is more boresome than an author who pretends to know
less about things than he really does know. It is this silly sort of
false naïveté that rots the weaker productions of Maeterlinck. Thank
heaven the advance guard is in process of escaping it.
It is possible that the new style will grow as weak in the future in the
hands of imitators as has, by now, the Victorian manner, but for the
nonce it is refreshing. Work of this sort can not be produced by the
yard in stolid imitation of dead authors.
I defy anyone to read it without being forced to think, immediately,
about life and the nature of things. I have perused this volume twice,
and I have enjoyed it.
_E. P._