Two Finds
Poems, by George Cronyn. [The Glebe. Albert and Charles Boni, New York.]
I am very sorry indeed that this book arrived when most of our space was pre-empted. I need room for the sort of appreciation that I feel for these poems.
That extraordinary, delightful, and Quixotic institution, The Glebe, which insists on publishing stuff on its merits, apart from considerations of popularity, has had divine luck in finding Cronyn,—whoever he is.
For Cronyn is a poet. Not just a versifier, but a poet. His verse has a facility which does not detract from its beauty. I have encountered sheer beauty more often in his book than in any volume of modern poetry that I have read for some time.
Here is a sample:
Clouds
Whence do you come, oh silken shapes,
Across the silver sky?
We come from where the wind blows
And the young stars die.
Why do you move so fast, so fast
Across the white moon’s breast?
The cruel wind is at our heels
And we may not rest.
Are you not weary, fleeing shapes,
That never cease to flee?
The forkéd tree’s chained shadows are
Less weary than we.
Whither do you go, O shadow-shapes,
Across the ghastly sky?
We go to where the wind blows
And the old stars die.
This is just a short and rather exuberant message to Little Review readers, because I think they really deserve the pleasure of discovering Cronyn for themselves.
Songs for the New Age, by James Oppenheim. [The Century Company, New York.]
One of the phenomena of the evolution of man is the constant broadening of consciousness. We become accustomed to the sharing of our feelings with larger and larger numbers of people; our identity with the race,—and even with inanimate things,—becomes increasingly plain to us through both the findings of science and heightened emotional receptivity.
And yet this wider consciousness by no means lessens the value or quality of personality. By a splendid paradox, the more we realize our inseparability with all life the more does our selfhood become accentuated. Thus is achieved the marriage of Democracy and Individualism. We find that, in the end, the cultivation of one is the nourishing of the other. I need hardly mention that I am not alluding to that similacrum of equality: political democracy.
This must be known to appreciate the message of James Oppenheim. For it is pre-eminently as a message that these poems should be treated. They are of essential value as one of the most articulate efforts to translate that which in most people is mute.
There is an unmistakable kinship with Whitman in this work; not merely in the form,—which is here termed “polyrhythmic,”—but in the spirit, without hint of plagiarism or of abject imitation. Also we have the same breezy contempt for the petty trappings of civilization.
Here is an extract from the poem, Tasting the Earth, which has beauty as well as truth:
O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me....
It was she with her inexhaustible grief,
Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,
And moan of the forsaken seas,
It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,
It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man....
It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,
Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,
And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,
And the dreams that have no waking.
My heart became her ancient heart:
On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:
Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages....
There was dank soil in my mouth,
And bitter sea on my lips,
In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.
This is enough to make one grateful to Mr. Oppenheim. But not always plays the cosmic symphony; sometimes the spheric strains relax for a few slender lyrics to a moving-picture lady or for the tender song to Annie, the working-girl. We leave the book with the conception of a manly and impressionable personality with a healthy lust for life, a deep insight into the world-soul and his own soul (which, after all, are the same), and great power to communicate his findings to us through a plastic and peculiarly individual medium.
Charles Ashleigh.