AND COMMENTS
MOODY'S POEMS
The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody will soon be published in two volumes by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. Our present interest is in the volume of poems, which are themselves an absorbing drama. Moody had a slowly maturing mind; the vague vastness of his young dreams yielded slowly to a man's more definite vision of the spiritual magnificence of life. When he died at two-score years, he was just beginning to think his problem through, to reconcile, after the manner of the great poets of the earth, the world with God. Apparently the unwritten poems cancelled by death would have rounded out, in art of an austere perfection, the record of that reconciliation, for nowhere do we feel this passion of high serenity so strongly as in the first act of an uncompleted drama, The Death of Eve.
Great-minded youth must dream, and modern dreams of the meaning of life lack the props and pillars of the old dogmatism. Vagueness, confusion and despair are a natural inference from the seeming chaos of evil and good, of pain and joy. Moody from the beginning took the whole scheme of things for his province, as a truly heroic poet should; there are always large spaces on his canvas. In his earlier poetry, both the symbolic Masque of Judgment and the shorter poems derived from present-day subjects, we find him picturing the confusion, stating the case, so to speak, against God. Somewhat in the terms of modern science is his statement—the universe plunging on toward its doom of darkness and lifelessness, divine fervor of creation lapsing, divine fervor of love doubting, despairing of the life it made, sweeping all away with a vast inscrutable gesture.
This seems to be the mood of the Masque of Judgment, a mood against which that very human archangel, Raphael, protests in most appealing lines. The poet broods over the earth—
The earth, that has the blue and little flowers—
with all its passionate pageantry of life and love. Like his own angel he is