Few men to-day read Eupheus and fewer Gongora. Yet in their time their concepts were considered to be fine flowers of poetry. Those who wrote so that all men could understand, as Sapho, Campion, Jorge Maurique, Petrarca, Villon, and their fellow-singers in the celestial spheres where poets sing, crowned with the bays of the approval of countless generations, all wrote clearly. Their verses all were clear as is the water running over chalk in a south country trout-stream, such as the Itchin or the Test.
I take two specimens of Miss Radclyffe-Hall’s poetry to illustrate what I have said. She writes of a blind ploughman, whose prayer is to his friend to set him in the sun.
“Turn my face towards the East
And praise be to God.”
One sees him sitting, wrinkled and bent, and ploughworn in the sun, and thanking God according to his faith, for light interior, for that interior vision which all the mystics claim.
“God who made His sun to shine
On both you and me,
God who took away my eyes,
That my soul might see.”
This shows the poet in an unusual light, for most poets write on far different subjects; but here is one which is eternal, and has been eternal since the time of Œdipus.