The second tradition of womanhood does not perish; but, in these present confusions of change, women of the more emotional and imaginative type are less potent than they have been and will be again. They appear equally inimical and heretical to the opposing camps of hausfrau and of suffragist. Their intellectual forces, liberated and intensified, prey upon the more instinctive part of their natures, vexing them with unanswerable questions. So Fiammetta mistakes herself to some degree, loses her keynote, becomes embittered and perplexed. The equilibrium of soul and body is disturbed; and she fortifies herself in an obstinate idealism that cannot come to terms with the assaults of life. No single sonnet expresses absolute truth from even her own point of view. The verses present the moods, misconceptions, extravagances, revulsions, reveries—all the obscure crises whereby she reaches a state of illumination and reconciliation regarding the enigma of love as it is, making her transition from the purely romantic and ascetic ideal fostered by the exquisitely selective conspiracies of the art of the great love-poets, through a great darkness of disillusion, to a new vision infinitely stronger and sweeter, because unafraid of the whole truth.
Fiammetta is frankly an enthusiast of the things of art; and her meditations unfortunately betray the fact that Etruscan mirrors are as dear to her as the daisies, and that she cannot find it more virtuous to contemplate a few cows in a pasture than a group of Leonardo's people in their rock-bound cloisters. For the long miracle of the human soul and its expression is for her not less sacredly part of the universal process than the wheeling of suns and planets: a Greek vase is to her as intimately concerned with Nature as the growing corn—with that Nature who formed the swan and the peacock for decorative delight, and who puts ivory and ebony cunningly together on the blackthorn every patterned Spring.
The Shaksperean form of sonnet yields most readily the piercing quality of sound that helps to describe a malady of the soul. But the system of completed quatrains in that model suits more assured and dominating passion than the present matter provides. A more agitated hurry of the syllables, a more involved sentence-structure, sometimes a fainter rime-stress, seem necessary to the music of bewilderment.
CONTENTS
THE PROLOGUE OF THE DREAMING WOMEN
We carry spices to the gods.
For this are we wrought curiously,
All vain-desire and reverie,
To carry spices to the gods.
We carry spices to the gods.
Sacred and soft as lotos-flowers
Are those long languorous hands of ours
That carry spices to the gods.
We know their roses and their rods,
Having in pale spring-orchards seen
Their cruel eyes, and in the green
Strange twilights having met the gods.