To abandon fixed rhythm, or meter, for the floating rhythm of the chant may not be an immediate solution of the problem. To follow the Psalms of David, for example, will not suddenly conjure a new school of verse into the world. But to return to the more open movement of the chant, which is man's natural and rudimentary form of song, may constitute a step towards freedom. The mere effort towards emancipation, in fact, is not without its value. It may serve to impress on certain minds the fact that poetry is capable of exhausting one particular form of expression, of incorporating and consuming one particular embodiment of perishable matter and passing on to its newer fields. Being a living organism, it uses up what lies before it, and to find new vigour must forever feed on new forms. Being the product of man's spirit, which is forever subject to change, verse must not be worshipped for what it has been, but for what it is capable of being. No necrophilic regard for its established conventions must blind the lover of beautiful verse to the fact that the primary function of poetry is both to intellectualize sensation and to elucidate emotional experience. If man must worship beauty only as he has known it in the past, man must be satisfied with worshipping that which has lived and now is dead.
A. S.
OPEN WATER
MILKWEED
I
The blue, blue sea,
And the drone of waves,
And the wheeling swallows,
And the sun on the opal sails,
And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,
And the milkweed thick at my feet,
And the milkweed held in the hand of a child
Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge,
Watching the fading sails
And the noonday blue
Of the lonely sea!
II
Was it all years ago,
Or was it but yesterday?
I only know that the scent
Of the milkweed brings it back,
Back with a strangle of tears:
The child and the misty headlands,
The drone of the dark blue sea,
And the opal sails
In the sun!