· · · · ·
And though love cannot bind me, Love,
—Ah no!—yet I could stay
Maybe, with wings forever spread,
—Forever, and a day.
Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper truths of life.
Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-century lilt, but not of imitation. There are no echoes in Miss Peabody’s song, its note, measure,
and spirit are entirely her own, and a random stanza would carry its identification, so individual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-century mood, however, are “The Song Outside,” “Forethought,” “The Top of the Morning,” “The Blind One,” and other poems.
Nearly all the lyrics in The Singing Leaves are very brief, showing, in their compactness and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody’s first book, The Wayfarers. So marked is the contrast that, but for the personality imbuing them, they might have been written by another hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the reaction to its present simplicity is the more marked. It is doubtless for this reason that many of the poems carry with them a note of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest effects had been deliberately achieved. Not so, however, such poems as “The Inn,” “The Drudge,” “Sins,” “The Anointed,” “The Walk,” whose words are quick with native impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third:
A lie, it may be black or white;