... I lost them
At the word "Sandusky." A landscape crossed them;
A scene no more nor less than a vision,
All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.
He is seven years back in time and many hundreds of miles away, pushing up a North American river in a screaming, smoky steamer, between high banks crowned with forests of fir:
And suddenly we saw a beach—
A grey old beach and some old grey mounds
That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds;
So still and old and grey and ragged.
For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows,
The Indian graves....
So, rather obliquely perhaps as to method, but with certainty of effect, we are prepared for the culmination in the third movement. The poet has fled from civilization and 'Modern Movements' to the upland heather of a high old mound above the town of Trêves. And here, on a late autumn evening, he lingers to think. He remembers that it is the eve of All Souls' Day; and remembers too that the mound on which he is seated is an old burying-place of great antiquity. In the cold and dark of his eerie perch, certain impressions of the last few days return to him, just those which have been subtly galling a secret wound and impelling him to flee—the tragedy of the Chinese queen, the vision of the old tumuli at Sandusky Bay, the unheeded platitudes of his friend—
... "From good to good,
And good to better you say we go."
(There's an owl overhead.) "You say that's so?"
My American friend of the rue de la Paix?
"Grow better and better from day to day."
Well, well I had a friend that's not a friend to-day;
Well, well, I had a love who's resting in the clay
Of a suburban cemetery.
One has felt all through that something weird is impending; but I am sure that no ghost-scene so curiously impressive as that which follows has ever been written before. It could not have been done, waiting as it was for the conjuncture of time and temperament and circumstance. But here it is, a thing essentially of our day; with its ironic mood, its new lore, its air of detachment, its glint of grim humour now and then, and its intense passion, both of love and of despair, which the fugitive show of nonchalance does but serve to accentuate. Passion is the dominant note as the myriad wraiths of long-dead lovers crowd past the brooding figure in the darkness.
And so beside the woodland in the sheen
And shimmer of the dewlight, crescent moon
And dew wet leaves I heard the cry "Your lips!
Your lips! Your lips." It shook me where I sat,
It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed,
The call of the dead. A multitudinous
And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed,
Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips
Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms
The coldness of the dew—and all a gleam
Translucent, moonstruck as of moving glasses,
Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders
Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods....
That poem naturally comes first in a little study, because it is the most considerable in the collection, and again because it is the most characteristic. It is very convenient, too, for illustrating those theories of the preface, as for example, that the business of the poet is "the right appreciation of such facets of our own day as God will let us perceive ... the putting of certain realities in certain aspects ... the juxtaposition of varied and contrasting things ... the genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression." But on æsthetic grounds one is not so sure of "To All the Dead" for the first place. Perhaps it tries to include too many facets of life—or death; perhaps we get a slight impression as regards technique that the poet is consciously experimenting; and there is a shade of morbidity haunting it. In many of the shorter pieces there is a nearer approach to perfection. "The Portrait," for instance, a symbolical picture of life, has only one flaw; a slight excess of a trick of repetition which is a weakness of our author. It is mere carping, however, to find fault with a piece which is so noble in idea and gracious in expression; and it seems a crime to spoil the lovely thing by mutilating it. But with a resemblance of theme, the poem is so strongly contrasted in manner with "To All the Dead" that one cannot resist quoting from it at this point. The idea, although great, is relatively simple: life, symbolized in the figure of a woman, seated upon a tomb in a sequestered graveyard. The mood is one of serene melancholy, not rising to passion or dropping to satire; and the gentle unity of thought and feeling leaves the mind free to receive the impression of beauty.
She sits upon a tombstone in the shade;