"So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative
an instigation to the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man
hidden beneath her hoop.
Patience said Gina is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans
One never asked the other."
These lines are not written as Henry Davray said recently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Georgian Anthology" poems are written, i.e., in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder à leur vocabulaire." Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set down to convey a definite meaning, and words accommodated to that meaning, even if they do not copy the mannerisms of the five or six by no means impeccable nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry Society has decided to imitate.
All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, according to the taste of the reader; according to his freedom from, or his bondage to, custom.
Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsicalities of these ladies, are the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities and mental quirks of Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be said for, some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but for all his roughness there remains with me the conviction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "Al que quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we found it in his earlier poems. "The Tempers" (published by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coroner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Imagistes"; but there is beyond these qualities the absolute conviction of a man with his feet on the soil, on a soil personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He is at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never without sap in abundance. His course may be well indicated by the change of the last few years; we found him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maximum of subjective reality:
POSTLUDE
Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry,
Temples soothed by the sun to ruin
That sleep utterly.
Give me hand for the dances,
Ripples at Philæ, in and out,
And lips, my Lesbian,
Wall flowers that once were flame.
Your hair is my Carthage
And my arms the bow,
And our words the arrows
To shoot the stars,
Who from that misty sea
Swarm to destroy us.
But you there beside me—-
Oh! how shall I defy you,
Who wound me in the night
With breasts shining like Venus and like Mars?
The night that is shouting Jason
When the loud eaves rattle
As with waves above me,
Blue at the prow of my desire.
O prayers in the dark!
O incense to Poseidon!
Calm in Atlantis.
From this he has, as some would say, "turned" to a sort of maximum objective reality in
THE OLD MEN
Old men who have studied
every leg show
in the city
Old men cut from touch
by the perfumed music—
polished or fleeced skulls
that stand before
the whole theatre
in silent attitudes
of attention,—
old men who have taken precedence
over young men
and even over dark-faced
husbands whose minds
are a street with arc-lights.
Solitary old men
for whom we find no excuses....
This is less savage than "Les Assis." His "Portrait of a Woman in Bed" incites me to a comparison with Rimbaud's picture of an old actress in her "loge." Not to Rimbaud's disadvantage. I don't know that any, save the wholly initiated into the cult of anti-exoticism, would take Williams' poem for an exotic, but there is no accounting for what may occur in such cases.
PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN IN BED
There's my things
drying in the corner;
that blue skirt
joined to the gray shirt—
I'm sick of trouble!
Lift the covers
if you want me
and you'll see
the rest of my clothes—
though it would be cold
lying with nothing on!
I won't work
and I've got no cash.
What are you going to do
about it?
——and no jewelry
(the crazy fools).
But I've my two eyes
and a smooth face
and here's this! look!
it's high!
There's brains and blood
in there—
my name's Robitza!
Corsets
can go to the devil—
and drawers along with them!
What do I care!
My two boys?
—they're keen!
Let the rich lady
care for them
they'll beat the school
or
let them go to the gutter—
that ends trouble.
This house is empty
isn't it?
Then it's mine
because I need it.
Oh, I won't starve
while there's the Bible
to make them feed me.
Try to help me
if you want trouble
or leave me alone—
that ends trouble.
The county physician
is a damned fool
and you
can go to hell!
You could have closed the door
when you came in;
do it when you go out.
I'm tired.
This is not a little sermon on slums. It conveys more than two dozen or two hundred magazine stories about the comedy of slum-work. As the memoir of a physician, it is keener than Spiess' notes of an advocate in the Genevan law courts. It is more compact than Vildrac's "Auberge," and has not Vildrac's tendency to sentiment. It is a poem that could be translated into French or any other modern language and hold its own with the contemporary product of whatever country one chose.