The danger to a poet in dropping too often into analogy is that he will become a singer of effects, a watcher of manifestations, and forget
to look for the gleam within himself and make it the light of his seeing. If poetry become too much a matter of observation, of report, vitality goes from it; for imagination is stultified and emotion quenched, and poetry at its best is a union of imagination and emotion. Mr. Burton’s poems in the main escape this indictment, but their danger lies along this line. His perception of identities is so acute, his sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing human alien to him, but there is nothing in which he cannot find a theme for poetry. For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty in the symbol of the homing bird, but its artistic value is lost from over-use. Mr. Burton has some pleasing lines upon it, reaching in the final couplet a stronger tone, but from the nature of the case they cannot possess any fresh suggestion; on the contrary in such lines as “Nostalgia,” “In The Shadows,” “The First Song,” “If We Had The Time,” though less poetic in theme, there is a personal note; one feels back of them the great weariness, the futile yearning of life. Some of the elemental emotion is in them, the personal appeal that is so much Mr. Burton’s note when he does not give himself too much to things without. Even though one use the visible event but as a sign
of the spirit, as the objective husk of the subjective truth, it is a vision which, if over-indulged, leads at length away from the living, the creative passion within. One philosophizes, one contemplates, but the angel descends less often to trouble the waters within one’s own being, and it is, after all, for this movement that one should chiefly watch.
Message and Melody, Mr. Burton’s latest collection, opens with perhaps his strongest and most representative poem, “The Song of the Unsuccessful.” It is a poem provocative of thought, and upon which innumerable queries follow. Its opening lines utter a heresy against modern thinking; our friends, the Christian Scientists and Mental Scientists and Spiritual Scientists, would at once cross swords with Mr. Burton and wage valiant conflict over the initial statement that God has “barred” from any one the “gifts that are good to hold.” Indeed, the entire poem would come under their indictment for the same reason. But something would be won from the conflict; the stuff from which thought is made is in the poem. In the mean time let us have it before we consider it further. Here are the types marshalled before us; we recognize them all as they appear:
We are the toilers from whom God barred
The gifts that are good to hold.
We meant full well, and we tried full hard,
And our failures were manifold.
And we are the clan of those whose kin
Were a millstone dragging them down.