As though one spoke a word half meant
That left a sting behind.
I knew not Grief would go from me
And naught of it be plain,
Except how keen the box can be
After a fall of rain.
Miss Reese’s art is its apparent lack of art, of conscious effort. Her diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction between simplesse and simplicité? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elimination, art that is temperament, however, that selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of effects. The words she employs are thrice distilled and clarified, until they become the essence of lucidity, and this essence in turn is crystallized into form in her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too little warmth and color; they are not the rich-dyed words of passion, they are rather the white, delicate words of memory, but no others would serve as well.
In reading certain poems of Miss Reese’s,
such as “Trust,” or her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” the clarity of the language recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow’s in which she exclaims: “Oh that I might wash my words in light!” The impression which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reese has washed her words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for illustration, the much-quoted lines “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic words:
Love came back at fall o’ dew,