What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What steam of blood or kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime.... But when the wearied Band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in Can Grande’s Castle—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of thinking ill of oneself”:
“Misery,” he said, “to have no chin,