A little schoolboy was once asked to explain the difference between prose and poetry. After some consideration he replied, ‘“blue violets” is prose, and “violets blue” is poetry.’ The distinction, we admit, is not exhaustive, but it seems to be the one that is extremely popular with our minor poets. Opening at random The Queens Innocent we come across passages like this:
Full gladly would I sit
Of such a potent magus at the feet,
and this:
The third, while yet a youth,
Espoused a lady noble but not royal,
One only son who gave him—Pharamond—
lines that, apparently, rest their claim to be regarded as poetry on their unnecessary and awkward inversions. Yet this poem is not without beauty, and the character of Nardi, the little prince who is treated as the Court fool, shows a delicate grace of fancy, and is both tender and true. The most delightful thing in the whole volume is a little lyric called April, which is like a picture set to music.
The Chimneypiece of Bruges is a narrative poem in blank verse, and tells us of a young artist who, having been unjustly convicted of his wife’s murder, spends his life in carving on the great chimneypiece of the prison the whole story of his love and suffering. The poem is full of colour, but the blank verse is somewhat heavy in movement. There are some pretty things in the book, and a poet without hysterics is rare.
Dr. Dawson Burns’s Oliver Cromwell is a pleasant panegyric on the Protector, and reads like a prize poem by a nice sixth-form boy. The verses on The Good Old Times should be sent as a leaflet to all Tories of Mr. Chaplin’s school, and the lines on Bunker’s Hill, beginning,
I stand on Bunker’s towering pile,
are sure to be popular in America.
K. E. V.’s little volume is a series of poems on the Saints. Each poem is preceded by a brief biography of the Saint it celebrates—which is a very necessary precaution, as few of them ever existed. It does not display much poetic power, and such lines as these on St. Stephen,—