likely there might be difficulty in paraphrasing them; perhaps one might find it hard to reduce them to logical form. Miss Daskam's verses are characterized by the same alert common sense which is the mark of her prose work. Miss Peabody's poems are the product of a sense uncommon and subtle, a divining sense; and whatever appearance of obscurity there may be in its expression is due to the diviner's method of suggesting truth by adumbration rather than by definition. This seems a clumsy way of explaining what is, after all, a sufficiently simple thing. One does not need to have the difference between this Road-Song and a mathematical proposition set forth with diagrams "At home the waters in the grass Went singing happy words; The latest book of verses by Mr. Yeats1 does not show an increase of control over his instrument. One has admired the childlike quality of his genius while deploring its occasional lapses into childishness. A poet must for proof of greatness show independence even of his own fancies. Mr. Yeats is often spiritualistic rather than spiritual, vaguely superstitious rather than mystical. How much of his work is the product of creative imagination, how much of indulged whimsy, remains to be determined. In form the present volume is deliberately queer. The printer has been encouraged to use red ink in certain passages which do not seem especially to cry for rubrication. A preface is let fall unexpectedly in the middle of the book. there the sign for "and" is substituted for the word. Is there something symbolic in the usage? Several of the poems seem to mean nothing, and one or two are not recognizably metrical, as, for instance, the lines called The Arrow: Here and "I thought of your beauty and this arrow I could weep that the old is out of season." "We sat grown quiet at the name of love. 1 In the Seven Woods. By W. B. YEATS. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903. this brilliant writer priest of a true poetic faith, and not merely victim of a minor obsession. Mr. Yeats is childlike in his lack of humor; to the profane, indeed, humorlessness seems a main quality of these symbolistic people. We are really not ready to be persuaded that the sublime and the ridiculous are precisely the same thing. When Mr. Yeats writes gravely: "Michael will unhook his trumpet When the supper has been spread. Of wonders that have happened one must be allowed to think it funny; though one may keep his face straight as he does before a child whose speech is equally ingenuous and cryptic. II. There is no mysticism in Gawayne and the Green Knight,' and there is a great deal of humor. It is, in fact, an agreeable reversion to a type of poetry now little cultivated. The present reviewer confesses that he sighed over the title, expecting to find some aerated treatment of the familiar Arthurian material. A glance at the first page relieved his mind at once. "Bless me!" he murmured, rubbing his eyes, "couplets!". "My tale is ancient, but the sense is new, Replete with monstrous fictions, yet half true; And, if you 'll follow till the story 's done, I promise much instruction, and some fun." The promise is kept. The story shall not be told here. One might say that the style combines something of the mellowness of Holmes with the airy familiarity of Byron; but it is not especially graceful, after all, to express admiration of one person in terms of two or three 1 Gawayne and the Green Knight. By CHARLTON MINER LEWIS. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903. others. Mr. Lewis is not an imitator; his little work bears all the marks of spontaneity. It belongs to a school of English poetry older and clearly more indigenous than that of Mr. Yeats; a school of which the first and greatest master is Chaucer. For a brief sample of its quality we may quote the description of the heroine : "Her face was a dim dream of shadowy light, I care not for the trivial, nor the fleeting. Beneath her dress a woman's heart was beating And I confess to you, in confidence, above her, Unseen, unknown, with all my soul I love her." Mr. Zangwill's verses 2 are modern, and, as a whole, impressive. They possess the poignant racial note which has given the key to his best prose work. Few among the inspired sons of Israel have concerned themselves so frankly and forcibly with the issues of Zion. There are, to be sure, many bits of verse in the present volume which, unless as they remind us of Heine, seem the work of a poet, and not especially of a Hebrew poet : : "Of woman and wine, of woods and spring, And all fair things that be, The poets have sung, of everything: But the poems which strike deepest are those which express the poet's sombre fidelity to the truth of that racial fate in which his own fate is involved. Mr. Zangwill has never shrunk from recording the sordidness as well as the grandeur of the Hebrew character. 2 Blind Children. By ISRAEL ZANGWILL. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. 1903. "Blarneying, shivering, crawling, taking all expression of impassioned feeling which colors and none, Lying a fox in the covert, leaping an ape in the sun. Tantalus-Porteus of peoples, security comes from within; Where is the lion of Judah? Wearing an ass's skin!" This is vigorous speech, bitter speech; for there is nobody more loyal to the ideals of his race than the speaker. Not a few of the poems possess an almost classical grace and finish. Here is one of the best of them: "Silly girl! Yet morning lies As your body's mystery, And the sea is not so deep As the soul in you asleep." none of the modern exuberant forms have excelled. So pure a technique as Mr. Watson's, applied to the expression of so pure a passion, could hardly fail to make his verses, "written during estrangement," 2 unusually impressive. The very restraint which his chosen medium imposes upon him is to the ultimate advantage of his poetry. If Mr. Kipling was the laureate of imperialism during the Boer war, Mr. Watson was the laureate of England; and this, in after years, when The AbsentMinded Beggar and other popular doggerel of the sort is forgotten, England will not be slow to feel. What is there in such verse as this, unless the prick of truth, to have aroused a popular clamor of resentment? "When lofty Spain came towering up the seas "Ah, not to-day is Nature on our side! The mountains and the rivers are our foe, And Nature with the heart of man allied Is hard to overthrow." 2 For England: Written During Estrangement. By WILLIAM WATSON. New York and London: John Lane. 1903. The popular clamor did, as we know, arise. If the poet had written blatant nonsense about the Briton's Duty to Strike for his Altar and his Birthright, his verse would have been accepted as quite suitable for the occasion. His position needs no further defense than is given by his own noble lines, On Being Styled "Pro-Boer: "Friend, call me what you will: no jot care I: I that shall stand for England till I die. England! The England that rejoiced to see Hellas unbound, Italy one and free; The England that had tears for Poland's doom, And in her heart for all the world made room; The England from whose side I have not swerved; The Immortal England whom I, too, have served, Accounting her all living lands above, Surely this is worthy to be set among the "noble numbers" of old England. III. Signs increase of a tendency on the part of our verse writers to approach the dramatic form. Miss Daskam's volume ends with a dramatic sketch in blank verse which is, perhaps, the best thing in the book. Mr. Yeats's collection includes a fresh play for his new Irish stage, apparently (how can a plain person be sure ?) only another leaf out of Maeterlinck. There are, moreover, since last accounts, several new volumes of metrical plays upon the market, only two of which can be mentioned here. The first1 is especially interesting because in presenting "five modern plays in English verse," the author is actually trying to interpret the present moment in blank verse; and she comes very near success, nearer, perhaps, than any one else has come. The three briefer numbers can hardly be called plays, but they are extremely good poetic dialogues, and one of them, at least (At the Goal) 1 The Passing Show. By HARRIET MONROE. Boston and New York: Houghton, Miffin & Co. 1903. is, with all its brevity, not only dramatic, but tragic. One is not sure that the two longer pieces should have been cast in verse at all. Perhaps it is simply their novelty which one resists; I am inclined to think there is a real incongruity between their substance and their form. It is hardly possible to doubt that the author has found her key-note in Sudermann, and Sudermann is essentially a prose interpreter of life. There is plenty of human intensity in his plays, but no precipitation of immortal passion. Like Ibsen, he studies conditions and types; the record of his observations is a marvel, but it is not poetry. In Miss Monroe's two plays we find similar materials. Each of them presents a pregnant psychological episode in the lives of a group of persons; and there is nothing in either situation which prose could not have taken care of. Such, after several careful readings and some serious thought, is my unwilling conclusion with regard to the absolute merit of these interesting studies. 2 Mr. Torrence's play is both less novel and less questionable in quality. It is tragic both in substance and in form. Its theme has the inestimable advantage of possessing already a hold upon the imagination of the general; an advantage which great dramatic poets from Eschylus to Shakespeare have sedulously pursued, and which the best of their successors down to Mr. Stephen Phillips have continued to pursue. Mr. Torrence has, like Mr. Phillips, successfully avoided the Shakespearean manner. How difficult a feat this is can hardly be understood by those who disbelieve in the existence of a poetic diction. Observing the usage rather than the theory of Wordsworth, we perceive that every age has its noble and familiar forms of speech; and the poet's only folly is to fail of recognizing the loftier instrument 2 El Dorado. BY RIDGELY TORRENCE. New York and London: John Lane. 1903, The gold, five-keyed Elizabethan horn There is no mistaking the firm, sustained touch of these verses; and their promise is not belied in the drama which follows. If the characterization were of as rare quality as the theme and the verse, the play would be great indeed. Just at that point in the poet's effort there seems a little suggestion of strain. Beatrix d'Estrada is admirable, but Perth and Coronado, the leading male characters, are not altogether free from that overt appeal to the sympathies which is a known property of melodrama. The dialogue is, for the most part, rapid and compact, and the action, while it does not attempt to preserve the unities, is dramatically true and complete. We ought to be grateful for so pure a product in dramatic poetry from the hand of an American. 1 Platonism in English Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By JOHN SMITHI In the end, one finds that the study of these contrasting experiments in poetic drama has served simply to reaffirm an ancient article of faith. No great dramatic poetry, no great epical poetry, has ever dealt with contemporary conditions. Only the austere processes of time can precipitate the multitude of immediate facts into the priceless residuum of universal truth. The great dramatists have turned to the past for their materials, not of choice, but of necessity. Here and there in the dark backward and abysm of time, some human figure, some human episode, is seen to have weathered the years, and to have taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth; and upon this foundation the massive structure of heroic poetry is builded. H. W. Boynton. ONE envies Mr. Harrison the many months of earnest study which Platonic Poetry. must have gone to the making of his account of Platonism in English Poetry. To walk familiarly, when one is young, with the ideal forms of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which loom over the pages of Plato, and ennoble by their presence so many fine English poems, is to insure genial and humane thinking when years shall have brought the philosophic mind. Yet the wisdom of allowing such delightful studies to be erected into a volume is not so clear. Indeed, the book seems to fall between the academic and literary stools. "Its method," says Mr. Harrison, "is purely critical. It has not attempted to treat the subject from the standpoint of the individual poet, but has tried to interpret the whole body of English poetry of the period under survey as an integral output of the spiritual thought and life of the time." Unluckily the "purely critical" method is not justified in the result. The book is disabled for both HARRISON. New York: The Columbia University Press. (The Macmillan Co.) 1903. |