Of fifty-two, such songs as we have heard,
Both you and I, when weltering in the clouds
Of that eternity which comes in sleep,
Or in the viewless spinning of the soul
When most intense,
and ends with common brothel profanity. The popular method of justifying the Masters treatment is to gibe at the Robinson reticence as Puritan prudishness, but it is a gibe which for many enforces the value of reticence even in modern art.
So much for the negative side of Mr. Masters’s work—the so-called cynicism declaimed at by the inattentive reader and the preoccupation with sex which is fairly open to criticism. On the positive side the greater weight of his work lies in poems of searching analysis. “So We Grew Together” is the changing relations of an adopted son for his Bohemian father; “Excluded Middle,” an inquiry into the mystery of inheritance; “Dr. Scudder’s Clinical Lecture,” the study of a paranoiac—dramatic monologues suggestive of Browning in execution as well as content. The reader of Mr. Masters as a whole is bound to discover in the end that all these analyses are searchings into the mystery of life. It appears in “The Loom” as it does in “The Cry”:
There’s a voice in my heart that cries and cries for tears.
It is not a voice, but a pain of many years.
It is not a pain, but the rune of far-off spheres.