The Poetry of T. Sturge Moore
In an early number of The Little Review a correspondent remarked that an article I had the honor of contributing sounded a rather curious note inasmuch as it was a piece of pure criticism in a magazine deliberately given over to exuberance.
Well, it is now my turn to stand up for exuberance as against a contributor, A. M., who gives the poetry of T. Sturge Moore criticism only, and, in my humble opinion, criticism as unfair as would be a description of Notre Dame rendered altogether in terms of gargoyles and their relative positions.
Would it not be more in the spirit of The Little Review to point out in the title poem of Mr. Moore’s book, The Sea is Kind, such passages as the two following:
Eucritos—
Thou knowest, Menalcas,
I built my hut not sheltered but exposed,
Round not right-angled.
A separate window like a mouth to breathe,
No matter whence the breeze might blow,—
A separate window like an eye to watch
From off the headland lawn that prompting wink
Of Ocean musing “Why,” wherever he
May glimpse me at some pitiable task.
Long sea arms reach behind me, and small hills
Have waded half across the bay in front,
Dividing my horizon many times
But leaving every wind an open gate.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There is a sorcery in well loved words:
But unintelligible music still
Probes to the buried Titan in the heart
Whose strength, the vastness of forgotten life,
Suffers but is not dead;
Tune stirs him as no thought of ours nor aught
Mere comprehension grasps, can him disquiet.
And these are parts of a dramatic poem full of fresh figures, colorful glimpses of the romance of ancient life, and what a school-boy would describe as a “perfectly corking” description of a sea fight with dead men slowly dropping through the green water—
As dead bird leaf-resisted
Shot on tall plane tree’s top,
Down, never truly stopping,
Through green translucence dropping,
They often seemed to stop.
And how, again could any thorough searcher of this book fail to mention that delightful recipe for wine “Sent From Egypt with a Fair Robe of Tissue to a Sicilian Vine-dresser, 276 B. C.” And surely no obscurity nor any uncouthness of figure—such as your critic objects to, as if poets did not have the faults of their virtues—mar those beautiful child poems:
That man who wishes not for wings,
Must be the slave of care;
For birds that have them move so well
And softly through the air:
They venture far into the sky,
If not so far as thoughts or angels fly.
Were William Cory making a prediction rather than “An Invocation” when he ended his poem of that title with the line:
Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.
I would feel like nominating Mr. T. Sturge Moore as its fulfillment.
Llewellyn Jones.
Amy Lowell’s Contribution
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, by Amy Lowell. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
... And Amy Lowell’s new volume of verse refutes all the critical disparagement of vers libre, imagism, or “unrhymed cadence,” as Miss Lowell herself chooses to call her work. For she demonstrates that it is something new—that it is a clear-eyed workmanship which belongs distinctly to this keener age of ours. Miss Lowell’s technical debt to the French—to the so-called Parnassian school—has been paid in a poetical production that will put to shame our hackneyed and slovenly “accepted” poets. Most of the poems in her book are written in vers libre, and this is the way Miss Lowell analyzes them: “They are built upon ‘organic rhythm,’ or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. They differ from ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence; it is constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface to his Poems, Henley speaks of ‘those unrhyming rythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme.’ The desire to ‘quintessentialize,’ to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly ‘unrhymed cadence’ is unique in its power of expressing this.”
Take Miss Lowell’s White and Green, for example:
Hey! My daffodil-crowned,
Slim and without sandals!
As the sudden spurt of flame upon darkness
So my eyeballs are startled with you,
Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees,
Light runner through tasselled orchards.
You are an almond flower unsheathed
Leaping and flickering between the budded branches.
Or Absence:
My cup is empty tonight,
Cold and dry are its sides,
Chilled by the wind from the open window.
Empty and void, it sparkles white in the moonlight.
The room is filled with the strange scent
Of wistaria blossoms.
They sway in the moon’s radiance
And tap against the wall.
But the cup of my heart is still,
And cold, and empty.
When you come, it brims
Red and trembling with blood,
Heart’s blood for your drinking;
To fill your mouth with love
And the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.
—M. C. A.