Stone-cold for ever?
the thought is neither close nor difficult, nor, on the other hand, is it loose, but the statement is not lucid. It is, however, intelligible after we have sifted it a little carefully, but in such a passage as—
A little thing just then had made me mad;
I dared not think, as I was wont to do,
Sometimes, upon my beauty; if I had
Held out my long hand up against the blue,
And, looking on the tenderly darken'd fingers,
Thought that by rights one ought to see quite through,
There, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers,
Round by the edges; what should I have done,
If this had joined with yellow spotted singers,
And startling green drawn upward by the sun?
the thought is hidden in an utterance so tangled and involved as to make it almost impossible to straighten it out, and in any case poetry so enigmatic ceases to be poetry at all. Such extreme instances are, however, very rare even in this first volume, and scarcely ever to be found in his later work. The title-poem throughout is uncertain in its expression. There are passages of fine directness and precision as—
And fast leapt Caitiff's sword, until my knight
Sudden threw up his sword to his left hand,
Caught it, and swung it; that was all the fight,
and the picture of Guenevere at the close, listening for Launcelot, 'turn'd sideways,'
Like a man who hears