Burn saffron and blue alway,
And trickling and tinkling
The snows of the drift decay.
Oh, mine is the head must hang
And share the immortal pang!
Winter or spring is fair;
Thaw’s hard to bear.
Heigho! my heart’s sick.”
Some of the verse from this middle period is so fragile and austerely tremulous, like bare boughs moved by a not unkindly wind, that you are aware of what has, in another sense, been called “scantness.” Not only does she adventure delicately in her shallop, she is fain of archaic brevity and pauses that do unquestionably halt the accompanying voyager, to his discomfiture. A Ballad of Kenelm was such as they chanted “on a May morning” in other days than ours. It has the consonance of prose trembling into verse. We are too luxurious for it. We want to be borne along on a lilting wave, we who have not found it possible to accommodate ourselves to the peg-leg-to-market of free verse (what our poet herself once called, in a mischievous snap-shot of judgment, “the rag-tag of vers libres”). Even the loving apostrophe to Izaak Walton is more chant than song, justified rather by the spirit than the form. One who knew her unceasing pains with verse and prose, how a stanza could never count itself finished beyond possibility of being smashed into unrecognizable fragments and remade, remembers this as an instance of her ruthlessness to her children even after they had grown up and gone their ways into the ultimate stronghold of the printed page. Here the opening lines run:
“What trout shall coax the rod of yore