above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.
H. D. has her limitations, as I said before. They are the most obvious thing about her, except her perfection. But it is so ridiculous to cavil at them, as it would be to deny the loveliness of one of the sea flowers she writes about, because it is not a forest of lofty trees.
To pass from H. D. to Mr. John Gould Fletcher is something in the nature of a shock. It is a good deal like plunging into the ocean from a warm, sunny cliff. One’s ears, and nose, and mouth, are filled with rushing water. One feels in the grasp of an overwhelming power, and one struggles to the surface, breathless, half-drowned, but wholly invigorated.
To drop the figure, these two poems of Mr. Fletcher’s are so full of potentialities, so large in suggestion, that one hardly knows what to say about them. Does The Blue Symphony mean life? I confess I do not know. Is it merely a series of pictures? No, there is a vague undercurrent to the poem which makes that impossible. It is the sort of poem which a mystic might ponder over indefinitely and find new meanings every hour. And yet it is all done with the precision and clearness of the Imagist theory.
It is impossible to give any idea of the poem as a whole by quoting bits of it. But little pieces, even divorced from their context, have that succinct epigrammatic quality which is the stamp of genius. Here are three lines:
I have heard and have seen
All the news that has been: