“POETRY.”

Otago Witness, Issue 3201, 21 July 1915, Page 79

“POETRY.”

By Jessie Mack at.

Miss Harriet Monroe, who edits this daring and fascinating little periodical, bears hard l upon the arch-obsession of the ages, like a true American; for America had seared into the soul of her 60 years ago the pioneer horror of war that all nations of the earth have yeb to experience—or, rather, to express in finished terms: “Poets have made more wars than kings,” she says, “ and war will not cease until they remove its glamour from the imaginations of men. What is the fundamental, the essential, and psychological cause of war? The feeling in men’s hearts that it is beautiful. And who have created this feeling? Partly, it is true, kings and their ‘armies with banners,’ but far more, poets with their war-songs and epics, sculptors with their statues. . . . Kings and artists have united to give to war its glamour, to transmute into sounds and colours and forms of beauty its savagery and horror, to give heroic appeal to its unreason, a heroic excuse to its rage and lust. “All this is of the past. The race is beginning to suspect their old ideals. When Nicholas of Russia and William of Germany in solemn state the other day invoked the blessing of God upon their armies, the emotion that went round the world was not the old thrill, but a new sardonic laughter. “ As Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away, so some poet of the new era may strip the glamour from war. There -will be a new poetry of war.” The lines she quotes, significantly enough, from one named Carl Sandburg, out-Whitman Whitman, and murder every canon of poetry. There is no shrift for a man whose emotions on beholding a mill tary statue are metred thus: I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap-yard. The “ huge contempt ” which Miss Monroe offers in excuse has been presented in another* fashion over the water by Alfred Noyes in “Lucifer’s Flash” and the “Wine Press.” But if a snatch of ultra-impressionism here shows one defiant side of America’s new Parnassus, the purely literary pages show a wholly new and eclectic aspect of the once translucent and sternly relevant American school. Take the dreamy gossamer of “ The Blue Symphony,” an elemental elegy on a dead maiden— Its author, John Gould Fletcher, owes America his birth, but has spent his poet’s wander-year where such gossamers are spun, not amid the stouter webs of a young country’s weaving. It is a delicate, intangible thing, the palest echo of Poe’s rich music in the dirge, “ Ulalume.” With an elfin deftness of touch the colour-sensa-tion of blue is woven into each page that tells of a spirit shut up to autumnal loss and despair; Sombre wreck—autumnal leaves ; Shadowy roofs In the blue mist, And a willow-branch that is broken. O, old pagodas of my soul, How you glittered across green trees! Blue and cool; Blue, tremulously, Blow faint puffs of smoke Across sombre pools. The damp green smell of rotted wood, And a heron that cries from out the water. Here is an exquisite verse, Ossianic in its misty rhapsody of a grief that Nature shares: The vast dark trees Flow like blue veils Of tears Into the water. The meadowland elegy has room for mocking, elfish things that envy men even their sorrow : Some sprites, Moaning and chuckling. What have you hidden from me ? In the palace of the bluestone eh© lies for ever Bound hand and foot.. And now the lowest pine-branch Is drawn across the, disk of the sun. Old friends who will forget me soon, I ■ must go on Towards those blue death-mountains I have forgot so long. In the frosty evening Toll the old bell for me Once, in the sleepy temple Perhaps my soul will hear. Afterglow: Before the stars peep I shall creep into the darkness, It is not for human nature’s daily food, this elusive “Blue Symphony.” But it is a sign of a poetic revolution that must be recorded in America’s fast sophisticating book of letters, along with this other contrasted fragment of impressionism, by a_ voung Chicagoan, Eunice Tietjens. Like Kipling, she is obsessed with the unhuman mystery of force, and reads yearningly a soul into the steam-shovel of the city streets. She sees— A creature huge and grim And only half believed; He is the new birth Of old Behemoth, late sprung from the source Whence Grendol sprang, And all the monster clan Dead for an age, now born again of man. O thwarted monster, horn, at man’s decree, A lap-dog dragon, eating from his hand. Have you no longing over to be free? In warm electric days to run amuck, Ranging like some mad. dinosaur. Your fiery heart at war With this strange world, the city’s restless ruck. Where all drab things that toil save you alone, Have life? . . . Or is your soul in very deed so tame, The blood of Grendel watered to a gruel, That you aro well content Thus placidly to chow your cud of fuel, And toil in peace for man’s aggrandisement? Poor helpless creature of a half-grown god! * “Poetry,” a Monthly Magazine edited by Harriet Monroe, 643 Cass street, Chicago.

There is power here, and the wandering eye that speaks the growing leisure of a land already half old. Is it noted that the poet of the hour is all eyes to-day, where ones he was pre eminently ear and mind and memory to a people who were many degrees less observant than himself? Twentieth-century verse is a weariful reflex of the kinematograph. Yet, if putting a soul in a steam-shovel will help to put a soul into a man, why not? Personally, of this special number of a specially interesting magazine of newest verse, we prefer the editor’s own work. Perhaps we are helped by a conservatism that has never learned to shed the shackles of metrical form. Her “Poems of Travel” strikes the old Viking note: They go down to the sea in ships, In ships they go down to the sea; And nay brothers, the masterful, free, Fear no more the white foam of her lips, The sweet wild kiss of the sea! They have won her, she harks to their wooing, The love of ten thousand years, The seeing, the wild undoing, The faith unto death, the tears. Here is a song of the great silent places of the summering West; So light and soft the days fall Like petals, one Irj one, Down from yon tree whose flowers all Must vanish in the sun. Like almond-petals downy, dear, Odorous, rosy-white, ■ Falling to our green world hero Off the thick boughs of night. Ever the same blue sky round Its chalice for the sun. The mountains at the world’s bound Their purple chorals run. And all lovers of dead Egyptian ladies must kneel before Queen Karomana in the Louvre: The wide Nile sleep, the desert stings With colour. Shake your tresses free. Queen Karomana! The sleepy lotus shines and swings— Loose your bound limbs and sail with me In a smooth shallop to the sea, Queen Karomana! Queen Karomana, still so mute, So delicate, yet cold as snow, Queen Karomana! An ice-wind, boldly resolute Rippled your thin robs long ago, And froze you into bronze —I know — But left your garment’s flecks of gold And the slim grace men loved of old, Queen Karomana! For a last word, hear the cry of a starved life in “ The Childless Woman” i O mother of that heap of clay, So passive on your breast, Now do yon stare at death, woman. Who yesterday were blest ? Now do you long to fare afar, And guide him cn the way Where he must wander all alone. His little feet astray? But I now, but I now— Sons of me seven and seven, The high God seals upon the brow. And summons from his heaven. O mother of that heap of clay, So passive on your breast; Now do you stare at death, tvoman? Nay, peace, for you are blest. Blest are you in your joy, woman, Blest are you in your pain— Once more he calls you past the worlds To sit with God again. But I now, but I now— Sons of me nine and nine, That looked on life and death with me, Are neither God’s nor mine. These are the strange young voices of the new American choir. We wish them well, and this valiant little dollar-and-a-half magazine of theirs, throwing its moon-rayed pearls before Chicago!