With a princely air:
“The noose draws tighter;
This is the end;
I’m a good fighter,
But a bad friend:
I’ve played the traitor
Over and over;
I’m a good hater,
But a bad lover.”
But “Fable,” with its effects in twenty-four lines as powerful as Coleridge’s in his Ancient Mariner, and “Lucifer Sings in Secret” are to me finer than “Peregrine” because more individual. I mean that I could imagine a later Browning writing “Peregrine,” but cannot imagine anyone but Elinor Wylie writing “Lucifer.” Much stress has been laid on Mrs. Wylie’s gift for bright, strange images in her poetry, and this is no small item in her genius; but the steeled emotion, the unearthly cry that is heard under the burnished and metallic surfaces, sometimes in not instantly intelligible words, is her voice as a poet. In “Now That Your Eyes Are Shut,” which I quote, there is one stanza that might have been written by a poet of a long-past century—I leave you to name him—but there are two stanzas, the most important, which I can imagine no one but Elinor Wylie writing: