Of God’s two-hornéd throne I will lay hold
And let him see my eyes;
That he may understand what love can be,
And raise his curse, and set his children free.
But quotations crowd upon me. Most of Moody’s best work bears witness to his glorification of man’s possible personality in rebellion against man’s restrictive conception of society and god. We have had many such rebels; the peculiar significance of Moody lies in the fact that he lacks utterly the triviality of the little radical, and that his is a power which springs from the most heroic in American quality.
Of course all this would be worth nothing unless Moody had the authentic utterance of the poet. His fulness of inspiration, combined with his sensitive editing, has left us scarcely a line which should have gone to oblivion. As an example of his magic take three lines from I Am the Woman, in which the woman is walking with her lover:
But I was mute with passionate prophecies;
My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather,
While universe drifted by after still universe.
Or the woman’s response to Pandora’s singing in The Fire-Bringer: