But at midnight in the alley
He will crouch again and wail,
And beat the time for his demon’s song
With the swing of his demon’s tail.
I am as certain that Marquis admires and condones the Tom-cat as I am that he has sought the troubling and elusive “Name” which has variously seemed, as he tells us in his fine poem, to be Love, and Beauty, and God.
The Boston Evening Transcript spoke not long ago of “the unhurried ascent of John Hall Wheelock to the highest rank among contemporary American poets.” The statement seems to me free from any exaggeration; and it is encouraging to think that Mr. Wheelock is in a way to reach the height more conspicuously than did Edwin Arlington Robinson, of whom, until his unveiling a few years ago by fellow poets, the larger public seems to have remained in a lamentable ignorance. Mr. Wheelock’s Dust and Light (1919) and his The Black Panther (1922) have a beauty and sentience best illustrated by quotation. Here are some lines from “Earth,” in Dust and Light:
Deftly does the dust express
In mind her hidden loveliness,
And from her cool silence stream
The cricket’s cry and Dante’s dream;