The daily increasing class of readers that likes unintelligible poetry should study Æonial. It is in many ways a really remarkable production. Very fantastic, very daring, crowded with strange metaphor and clouded by monstrous imagery, it has a sort of turbid splendour about it, and should the author some day add meaning to his music he may give us a true work of art. At present he hardly realises that an artist should be articulate.
Seymour’s Inheritance is a short novel in blank verse. On the whole, it is very harmless both in manner and matter, but we must protest against such lines as
And in the windows of his heart the blinds
Of happiness had been drawn down by Grief,
for a simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle. Some of the other poems are so simple and modest that we hope Mr. Ross will not carry out his threat of issuing a ‘more pretentious volume.’ Pretentious volumes of poetry are very common and very worthless.
Mr. Brodie’s Lyrics of the Sea are spirited and manly, and show a certain freedom of rhythmical movement, pleasant in days of wooden verse. He is at his best, however, in his sonnets. Their architecture is not always of the finest order but, here and there, one meets with lines that are graceful and felicitous.
Like silver swallows on a summer morn
Cutting the air with momentary wings,
is pretty, and on flowers Mr. Brodie writes quite charmingly. The only thoroughly bad piece in the book is The Workman’s Song. Nothing can be said in favour of
Is there a bit of blue, boys?
Is there a bit of blue?
In heaven’s leaden hue, boys?
’Tis hope’s eye peeping through . . .
for optimism of this kind is far more dispiriting than Schopenhauer or Hartmann at their worst, nor are there really any grounds for supposing that the British workman enjoys third-rate poetry.
(1) The Discovery and Other Poems. By Glenessa. (National Publishing Co.)