That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,
And dies between the seawall and the sea.
How perfect those last three lines are! How skilful, in painting the sea, to concentrate upon something from inland, making the ocean twice as old and vast and unquiet because of that little tinkling tune.
One will find in Rupert Brooke various kinds of things, but never attitudinizing and never insincerity. He is one of the most important of those young Englishmen who are doing so much for modern poetry. He is essentially a poet’s poet, and yet his feet are deep in the common soil. Swinburne would have liked him, but the significant thing is that Whitman would, too. There are several poems I have not mentioned that Whitman would have loved.
Tagore As a Dynamic
George Soule
[We do not agree that Tagore is a dynamic; we find him a poet whose music is more important than his thinking. But we are glad to print this interesting analysis.]
In The Crescent Moon, with its ravishing beauty of childhood, in The Gardener, with its passion of love, and especially in Gitanjali and Sadhana (Macmillan), with their life universal and all-permeating, we have found the poet Tagore and been grateful. It remains to ask: What has Tagore done to us? What is he likely to do for the future? What has been his answer to the promise and the challenge of the world?
Religions have provided one answer. In his zeal of affirmation the prophet has declared that the individual lives after death; that in some unseen world completion shall be attained. Yet increasing millions find this explanation fading into unreality. If one living organism is perpetuated after its physical dissolution, why not another? We can account for every particle of life which the blossom loses by its death. Some has passed to the seed; the rest finds its chemical reaction, which in turn produces other forms of life—in entirely new individuals. To assert that the original blossom lives in an unseen form outside the realm of thought is preposterous. Why should it? Its function has been accomplished. The sentimentality behind this thinking is a weak prop for a vigorous mind. And exactly the same reasoning applies to all living organisms, including man.
The more intelligent part of mankind has also outgrown the conception of a definite heaven. It is impossible to imagine a satisfactory heaven for the individual. A place where there is no strife, where everything is perfection and completion—what joy is to be found there? The essence of life as we know it is growth and survival; its happiness comes from the exercise of a function. Growth and survival postulate extinction; in heaven an individual would evaporate.