Penguin Persons & Peppermints

by Walter Prichard Eaton

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection of epithet, here is no “poetic” diction of the despised sort. But something is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it does not ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourself repeating it days and months later. Close the book—and the poem perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.

It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in the new verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's poem, The Return:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the pace of these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired, but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem by anybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she could repeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off the immortal nonsense, beginning, “She went into the garden patch to get a cabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up the road thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so he died—” and the woman was floored. Such a poem as The Return would have floored her quite as completely. I find, after reading carefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound in The New Poetry Anthology, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe, than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat just one line—or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasing his rhythms. Here they are:

Dawn enters with little feet
Like a gilded Pavlova.

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmic suggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line has stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and the rest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms.

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes, for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She selects his wonderful poem The Listeners, and the quaint, haunting, Epitaph. It is a little hard to see just why The Listeners is new poetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but really intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified that there is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyric romanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its occasional lapses into the ancient “poetic” vocabulary (the traveler “smote” the door, the listeners “hearkened,” and so on), are all a part of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse. It is no more modern than La Belle Dame Sans Merci—which, to be sure, is quite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it has lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through the ear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:

Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the stillness surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free, render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than “the sound of iron on stone”? The last two lines, surely, are close to perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a less hackneyed word than “plunging,” but though it would possibly have sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as near perfection as it is often permitted mortals to approach, and it lingers and echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten. It has the lilt of music, the chime of tune, the immemorial loveliness of song. If the precise image, the desired emotional effect, the intellectual content can be imparted in fettered verse, and, in addition, the ancient loveliness can be retained, which the new verse lacks, can it be possible that the world will long endure to read vers libre when vers libre has done its work of bringing poets back to first-hand reality for their subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit of their age? I cannot think so. I cannot but believe that any poetry long to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that is just what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from my acquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated, vers libre is a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, is swinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probably forgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been prepared anew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. I believe that memorable poetry always has been, and always must be, irradiated by

The light that never was on sea or land,