The cage, within whose room
Paces your burning thought,
For the delight of Whom?
The black and silver of cover and jacket on Elinor Wylie’s second book of poems, Black Armour, were not so much to match the title as to convey the colour impression of a number of readers who had studied the book in manuscript. The poems, grouped under the names of the parts of a suit of armour—Breastplate, Gauntlet, Helmet, Beaver Up, Plumes—perhaps require study, not in the sense of textual analysis (though they will repay that) but in the sense of returning to them several times, so that their compressed emotion may fully expand itself. I had almost said, explode itself. Indeed, it may sometimes produce nothing short of an explosion of feeling in the sensitive reader. I am thinking now of such works as “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut” (which opens the section called Plumes). I have heard the poem “Peregrine” called the best in the book, the dryly concise account of a
Liar and bragger,
He had no friend
Except a dagger
And a candle-end
and whose career, the narration of which includes a dozen feats of rhyming, was summed up when
He spoke this sentence