Seen and sought by the farmost sail;
Made a name that no years could weaken,
Fought a way to the fore of nations,
All lands owning her vast avail!
The repetition of “weaken,” as applied first to the song and then to the name, is not effective; there seems to be confusion of ideas between a place that is merely a glimmering beacon and one that has attained to “the fore of nations,” while the meaning of the last line is not clear. The inspiration which carried the writer brilliantly through three verses failed her in the last.
Yet there are individual poems in this collection which betray no serious defects of workmanship. They are short and strong and self-contained. They are the exception to the general rule which makes Miss Mack a poet of exceptional promise but of uneven performance. The lines On Wairee Hill are imaginative, and always musical. Illusion strikes more than one resonant note. In the verses entitled Vows we get the woman’s emotional and intellectual strength in revolt against the trammels of conventionalism; and in As long as any May there is as much intensity as the brainy Australian woman usually allows herself to feel—or, at any rate, to express.
There is a certain intellectual force, as well as a genuine poetic vein, in the verses of Miss Louise Mack. One imagines her to be always mistress of herself. The lyric mood may interpret her, but it does not master her. We find here no hint of the school which delights in “sense swooning into sound.” To quote from her poems is hardly to do her justice. She is stronger mentally, and finer artistically, than her published work.
There is one short piece entitled—it might be Silences—which seems to interpret, as nearly as possible, her independent, woman’s view of life. It begins:—
I take my life with my hands,
You shall not touch, you shall not see;