REVIEWS
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.