It will be observed that in the special sort of picture-making which Imagist poetry achieves, the question of free verse is merely incidental. "We fight for it as a principle of liberty," says Miss Lowell, but she does not insist upon it as the only method of writing poetry. Mr. Aldington admits frankly that about forty per cent of vers libre is prose. Mr. Lowes, as we have already remarked, has printed dozens of passages from Meredith's novels in the typographical arrangement of free verse so as to emphasize their "imagist" character. One of the most effective is this:
"He was like a Tartar
Modelled by a Greek:
Supple
As the Scythian's bow,
Braced
As the string!"
Suppose, however, that we agree to defer for the moment the vexed question as to whether images of this kind are to be considered prose or verse. Examine simply for their vivid picture-making quality the collections entitled Imagist Poets (1915,1916,1917), or, in the Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915, such poems as J. G. Fletcher's "Green Symphony" or "H. D.'s" "Sea-Iris" or Miss Lowell's "The Fruit Shop." Read Miss Lowell's extraordinarily brilliant volume Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), particularly the series of poems entitled "Towns in Colour." Then read the author's preface, in which her artistic purpose in writing "Towns in Colour" is set forth: "In these poems, I have endeavoured to give the colour, and light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing the purely pictorial effect, and with little or no reference to any other aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander through a city looking for its unrelated beauty, the beauty by which it captivates the sensuous sense of seeing." [Footnote: Italics mine.]
Nothing could be more gallantly frank than the phrase "unrelated beauty." For it serves as a touchstone to distinguish between those imagist poems which leave us satisfied and those which do not. Sometimes, assuredly, the insulated, unrelated beauty is enough. What delicate reticence there is in Richard Aldington's "Summer":
"A butterfly,
Black and scarlet,
Spotted with white,
Fans its wings
Over a privet flower.
"A thousand crimson foxgloves,
Tall bloody pikes,
Stand motionless in the gravel quarry;
The wind runs over them.
"A rose film over a pale sky
Fantastically cut by dark chimneys;
Across an old city garden."
The imagination asks no more.
Now read my friend Baker Brownell's "Sunday Afternoon":
"The wind pushes huge bundles
Of itself in warm motion
Through the barrack windows;
It rattles a sheet of flypaper
Tacked in a smear of sunshine on the sill.
A voice and other voices squirt
A slow path among the room's tumbled sounds.
A ukelele somewhere clanks
In accidental jets
Up from the room's background."