Chapter VII

Over the slate roof tall clouds, like ships of the line, pass along the sky. The glass-houses glitter splotchily, for many of their lights are broken. Roses bloom, fiery cinders quenching under damp weeds. Wreckage and misery, and a trailing of petty deeds smearing over old recollections.

The musty rooms are empty and their shutters are closed, only in the gallery there is a stuffed black swan, covered with dust. When you touch it the feathers come off and float softly to the ground. Through a chink in the shutters one can see the stately clouds crossing the sky toward the Roman arches of the Marley Aqueduct.

The Philosopher

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

He was an old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long before the time during which we will know him he was a doctor, and drove a jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg, Ohio. Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died.

The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe, and after his wife’s death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once, on a hot day in August, he tried but found it stuck fast, and after that he forgot all about it.

Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the seeds of something. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner block, above the Paris Dry Goods Company’s store, he worked ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.

Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls and when the pockets were filled with these he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard, who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes in a playful mood old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nurseryman. “That is to confound you, you blithering old sentimentalist,” he cried, shaking with laughter.

The story of Doctor Reefy and of his courtship of the tall dark girl, who became his wife and left her money to him, is a very curious story. It is delicious like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture and people. On the trees are only a few knarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the knarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon. He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded gray horse and went slowly along country roads. On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.

One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that rose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again.

The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was going to have a child and had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a series of circumstances also curious.

The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she saw suitors almost every evening. With the exception of two they were all alike. They talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who were different were much unlike the others. One of them, a slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity. When he was with her he was never off the subject. The other, a black-haired boy with large ears, said nothing at all, but always managed to get her into the darkness where he began to kiss her.

For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler’s son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked, and then she began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to think there was a lust greater than in all of the others. At times it seemed to her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping. She had the dream three times, then she became pregnant by the one who said nothing at all, but who in the moment of his passion actually did bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed.

After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her that she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office in the morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had happened to her.

In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country practitioners Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on the woman’s white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. When the woman and the man had gone the doctor smiled. “I will take you driving into the country with me,” he said.

For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together almost every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in an illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples and could not again get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in the apartments. In the fall after the beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy and in the following spring she died. During the winter he read to her all the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to become round hard balls.

Song of the Killing of Liars

RICHARD HUNT

My hands have grown strong
Wanting to clutch throats.
I have looked about me, Love,
And you are the only one
I do not want to kill.

They tried to kill me
When I was young and helpless:
They almost did for me,
And I cannot forgive them.

Whom shall I choke first?—
The minister who told me a piece of bread
Was Christ’s body to be chewed weepingly?
Or my father who nearly frightened me to death
Because I dreamed about a girl?
Then there is my old teacher
Who made me write five hundred times,
“A man’s first duty is to his flag.”

Liars!

First I will insult them
And strip them naked of their lies:
Then I will choke them dead,
And burn their institutions.

There will be nothing left
But the clean earth and some children—
Our child, Love, and a child for it to mate with.
The air they breathe will be pure
For the lies will be all dead.

Mlle. Poetry Meets Me at the Church

ROSCOE WILLIAM BRINK

To a New York poetry society one night with a friend of a friend.... I had always wanted to see that society. Long have I listened in awe to the unutterable rhythms of the city itself: the daily ictus of the workward crowds in the morning, the beat again in the homeward evening, lyric activity of the weeks rising to a crest like an Elizabethan sonnet to end in a Saturday-Sunday couplet of application to the heart of man, involved quatrains of the seasons, free verse epochs and tensions, years and decades. As I listened to these bigger canticles of New York City I have wanted to see its poetry society, fancying it some homely cricket on its communal hearth—my pleasant heart-warming dream. You see, also, besides listening in on this great, loud city voice, I once wanted to write poetry myself—but that was long ago before, under penalty of death by starvation, they took me and put me to work and rediscovered vers libre.

As I sat beside the friend of a friend, gazing in glad surmise at an elegant assembly of ladies and gentlemen, the poetry society meeting came to order. Not since I was fourteen-fifteen, and went to prayer-meeting because the girl I adored would be there, have I experienced such emotions as I experienced then.

I don’t suppose you know my particular old white church prayer-meeting. I used to go, rain or shine, every Friday night, and sit where I could watch the door admit the pretty upward toss of curls of my affections’ desire. Sometimes she didn’t come and didn’t come. The opening hymn would be sung and I would hear it not, for my eyes were upon the door. Another hymn and the preacher would begin to speak with a gentle, gushing, splashing sound at the mouth, but the door would remain closed; and knotted, stifling disappointment be clutching at my throat. Another hymn, and the discussion would be thrown open to the congregation. Well, the door was stolid; I would slide back from the edge of my chair and breathe thickly of the resisting air. So late, she would not come now. To be sure, the congregation was some comfort: there were the frisky young lady and the frisky middle-aged lady who would pop to their feet with a squeal of enthusiasm, the deacons and the elders, the sincere girls, the succinct young men with a duty to perform, the conservatives and the infirm—all of them to speak. There came one night when there was rejoicing in heaven’s hour. Somebody had sent a check to pay for a new coat of white paint for the church. The treasurer arose from his chair and lifted up the check for all to see. Then were hymns and glad talks with God and with woman and man. The banks next day refused to honor the check.

In the New York poetry society meeting appeared no novelty for me. I had been there before, so it seemed. Then, as of old, the meeting-room was more charming, the congregation more elegant, but the same, even to the frisky ones, with an exception in the authors’ literary agent I saw just a few feet from me. Otherwise the same—a prayer-meeting, the great American habit, a community impulse boiled down to four-square-wallsful.

As the meeting progressed I knew I had been there before. Absently I looked toward the door for the pretty upward toss of curls again, but I caught myself in time. Notices were read—again I looked toward the door, and stopped. Jokes were made about vers libre; several very interesting recitations were given; restlessly my eyes wandered doorward again. One always forms such bad habits when he is young. Poems now were being read, and criticized. But I had given up: I was looking toward the door and willing to acknowledge it. But she for whom I looked, came not. Then the leader with pleasure read a list of several new members—one of them with the name of a certain rich person, a name I had often seen associated with the millions of commerce but never with the measures of verse. An uncrushed sigh of self-congratulation went up over the room. I took my last look at the stolid door, slid back from the edge of my chair; gave up. I knew She would not come. My heart beat as of old, whimsically and sadly. She would not come.

I took my friend of a friend by the hand and sidled out of the room into the night. A few corners away we came upon a news-stand, full of magazines, upon every magazine a cover, upon every cover a girl, one and the same forever and ever. “If She had come, would She have been so grown that She would have looked like them?” I asked.

“Who come?” asked my friend of a friend.

“The Spirit of Poetry,” says I. “She hadda right, you know.”

American modernity, I bless thee through closed teeth—get thee to thy prayer-meetings or some Billy Sunday will Carl Sanburg thee.

Silhouettes

HARRIET DEAN

Barn-Yarding

I cannot joyously write little things. Perhaps that is why I write none at all. The little people about me fill me with disgust. They are cocksure bantam hens, loose and fertile, laying egg-thoughts carelessly. The crack of shells is loud, but tiny wet chicks roll out, smaller than the rest. God forbid that I am of the same breed! If I must linger in the barn-yard for a few days, studying the swagger of these hens and silently measuring my own, may I in the end fly away to my mountain-top—alone in the night. Strut, if I must, but quite alone.

* * * * *

Their voices are splinters of sound which prick my desolation to shreds. My one great fear is that clumsily they may stumble against my loneliness. What matter if the tongue be unknown to me! These tone arrows beat at my door like undesired rain; they hurl themselves against my tissue walls until I shall go mad with their urgence.

The only true friendliness near me is the blank brick wall of the house next door. I wrap myself in its unresponsiveness and stop up my ears with its cold silence that I may have courage to go on with my work.

* * * * *

Flame curtains flap in my grate and send grey indistinctness shivering and stumbling over my walls.

A dusty mirror in a lonely house waits....

Departure

“And now you, too, must go,” she said to me; I who had already gone, silently, tenderly lest my steps break the stairs of her heart.

Announcements

_The Migratory Magazine_

We have been invited to spend the summer in San Francisco, so we decided to carry THE LITTLE REVIEW along and publish it there until October or November. Then we shall go back to Chicago for a couple of months, and by the first of the year we plan to establish ourselves in New York, where all good things seem to turn at last. Our travels have been so exciting that it was impossible to get out a June issue on the way. (In all honesty I should add that the chronic low state of the treasury had even more to do with it.) So we have combined the June and July issues, as we did last year. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.

_Charles Kinney’s Article_

Mr. Kinney’s exposure of conditions at the Chicago Art Institute, which was advertised in the last issue, has not come in time to go in. The court procedures have taken much of Mr. Kinney’s time. It will be published in the August issue.

Psycho-Analysis

Some Random Thoughts Thereon

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Why not history rewritten from the researches of the Freudians? We have our economic determinism; why not our psycho-sexual? The tendencies of the individual studied in their relations to world-breaking and world-making! Hannibal and his mother, Queen Elizabeth and her nurse, Frederick the Great and the Oedipus complex!

The priest of the future will be the Inspired Physician. All tendencies seem so to point. The Christian Scientist and New Thought healers are vague and emotional answers to this social demand, the psycho-analytic physician a more sophisticated and precise one. The functions of those who now minister separately to soul and to body will, as in primitive society, again be united. The modern medicine-man shall be the priest of the new order!

To the adolescent, the value of the Inspired Physician can scarcely be over-stated. Jeanne D’Orge has thus written of the sixteen-year-old period:

I wish there were Someone
Who would hear confession:
Not a priest—I do not want to be told of my sins;
Not a mother—I do not want to give sorrow;
Not a friend—she would not know enough;
Not a lover—he would be too partial;
Not God—he is far away;
But Someone that should be friend, lover, mother, priest, God all in
one,
And a Stranger besides—who would not condemn nor interfere,
Who when everything is said from beginning to end
Would show the reason of it all
And tell you to go ahead
And work it out your own way.

What of the functions of the physician-priest in marriage! The possibilities are, to say the least, interesting. As substitute for the churchly bunk talked at the average churchly ceremony, an intimate tete-a-tete between, say, the Inspired Physician and the woman. It might do much to validate the “sacredness” of wedlock. And, incidentally, I wonder what data the Freudians are going to contribute during the next ten years to feminism. Ellis states that sexual normality isn’t possible to determine because there isn’t enough material by which to base a norm. Especially, says he, is this true of the sexual psychology of women. Valuable, then, will be the testimony of those who have been hearing confessions!

One of the most powerful functions of the Catholic Church united with modern scientific research! I wonder if the need for the confessional isn’t eternal.

Amazing, isn’t it, that the most remarkable contributions to the study of personality come out of the modern Prussianized Teutonic empires? On the one hand men mowed down by the socialized thousands; on the other this incredibly patient and exhaustive searching into the bewildering complexities of the individual soul.

Break through the crust of any man as he thinks he is, and you are plunged into currents undreamed of. And isn’t one amazed at how much alike we all of us are—and how different!

The Freudian searching into motives is the accredited material of the novelist; the use of dream symbols the very stuff of the poet. The successful psycho-analytic physician ought to combine the adroitness of the fictionist with the imagination of the versifier.

From the standpoint of medical technique Freud and Jung may have diverged importantly—philosophically the younger man builds on the Freudian researches and there is no break in the continuity. Freud is perhaps more valuable to the physician; to the layman Jung opens up a realm of speculation and discovery more fascinating than that of Darwinism.

The old sweet mythos, as friend Browning says, has been rediscovered. We are more wonderful than we thought. We are carrying about in our compassed personalities all dreams and imaginings. What avails the modernity of elevators and skyscrapers! You, betrousered one, walking Michigan Avenue—in your psyche are the ancient Hindus and the dancing sun-worshippers. You with the hand-bag and that 1916 model frock, do you truly think you are thinking in terms of American asphalted Chicago? Indeed! It was the symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries that was used in the image which flashed into your mind just then. How was it recreated? Heaven knows—or Dr. Jung! And in your dreams, when the censor is quite off guard—how did you, prosaic being, become suddenly the wildest of poets?

The average man—by that I mean the average man of cultivation—is not at all cognizant yet of the large significance of the psycho-analytic studies. He thinks them some libidinous sex-stuff come out of Germany, or perhaps one of the many new methods to be tried on the insane and the neurotic. Their immense import for the normal (whatever _he_ is!) he has not yet understood. It will take perhaps another five years, for the discoveries of psycho-analysis to penetrate the popular consciousness. Perhaps less—for some Augustus Thomas (God save us from such!) may before then write a play about it.

A Dyptich

SKIPWITH CANNELL

Wonder Song

No man who borrows
Should return the exact debt;
Let him return more,
Or let him return less.

I borrowed twelve dollars
From a rich uncle of mine:
I paid him back a hundred’s worth of poetry.

He is not satisfied.
I am not forgotten.

I borrowed from a stranger
An old coat full of lice;
The cloth became strong serge,
The lice became buttons.

The stranger
Wanted his old coat back again,
He got an old joke instead
And went away laughing.

I gave my God some second-hand prayers,
Prayers that were used and fingered and worn;
In return He gave me
My heart’s desire.

I gave my God all the love that’s in me....
He put it in His pocket,
Absently,
With talk of the weather:
He’s a wise God, knowing His own worth.

No one who borrows
Should make exact payment;
If he does as I say
He’ll be remembered forever.

Scorn

I will not lay bricks for the homes of other men;
I prefer to fell trees in the forest,
To fell them and let them lie.
If I go to the forests, I will starve;
If I lay bricks for those others,
They will feed me soup and black bread and onions.

I will fell trees
Angrily,
And I will let them lie.

The Deeper Scorn

I will lay many bricks:
And that I may lay them better,
I will take their bread and their soup ...
Courteously returning thanks
For the wages they offer....

I will lay many bricks,
And in a straight row,
As befits one who has knowledge of his freedom.

Hokku

EDGAR LEE MASTERS

I lift my eyes from the humus
Up the sea-green stalk to the flower.
The base of the petals is red as blood;
But I cannot see the line that divides
The rim of the petals from the sun light.

Poems

MARK TURBYFILL

Thin Day

Bright, alert,
Arise these wild blue buds
Above this crystal jar.

But they have no soul,
And bear no sweetness
On their lips.

Oh pity of azure days
Like these blue flowers!
We cannot endure in their thinness:
Our hearts sink
Through their petal-gauze.

The Rose Jar

O Earth,
You have brought me out too soon!

He whom I love
Still clings upon the branch,
Firm, a slender bud.
But you have spread me wide.

Take these broken leaves,
Now fallen from the core.
(O Earth,
You have brought me out too soon!)
Drop them into your Jar
For him who shall surely pass this way,
At last!

The Irish Revolutionists

PADRAIC COLUM

The British Government, which was quite willing to exploit the sympathy felt here on the premature death of the young English poet, Rupert Brooke, shot to death three Irish poets, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett.

Not only in Ireland, but the whole world is at a loss by the extinction of these three brave, honorable, and distinguished lives.

The English illustrated journals that have just come to New York enable us to estimate by a contrast the world’s loss. They have published the photographs of the Irish revolutionary leaders; and with them they have published the photograph of the man who ordered their execution, General Maxwell. On one side they give you intellectual and spiritual faces—the faces of men who liberate the world. On the other side they give you a heavy, non-intellectual, non-spiritual face—the face of a man who could never liberate himself.

The vision and the aspiration of Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett is on record for the world to know. A man cannot lie when he speaks of his vision or his aspiration in poetry. We know what Padraic Pearse thought of personal life. He has recorded it in his poem _To Death_, which has been translated from the Irish:

I have not gathered gold;
The fame that I won perished;
In love I found but sorrow
That withered my life.

Of wealth or of glory
I shall leave nothing behind me
(I think it, O God, enough!)
But my name in the heart of a child.

And what vision of life had Thomas MacDonagh? We know, for it is in his poem _Wishes For My Son_:

But I found no enemy,
No man in a world of wrong,
That Christ’s word of Charity
Did not render clean and strong—
Who was I to judge my kind,
Blindest groper of the blind?

God to you may give the sight
And the clear undoubting strength
Wars to knit for single right,
Freedom’s war to knit at length;
And to win, through wrath and strife,
To the sequel of my life.

But for you, so small and young,
Born of Saint Cecilia’s Day,
I in more harmonious song
Now for nearer joys should pray—
Simple joys: the natural growth
Of your childhood and your youth,
Courage, innocence, and truth:

These for you, so small and young,
In your hand and heart and tongue.

And we know the vision of life that Joseph Plunkett had—it was the same vision that the great mystics and the great religious had. It is in his poem _I See His Blood Upon the Roses_:

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.

These three men had a vision for their country that could not be expressed in a proclamation, no matter how nobly worded that proclamation might be.

Padraic Pearse gave all his thought and all his effort to bring back a chivalry to Ireland—the Heroic Age of Celtic History, when, as he said, “the greatest honor was for the hero with the most childlike heart, for the King who had the largest pity, and for the poet who visioned the truest image of beauty.” The first thing you saw when you entered his school in Cullenswood House was a fresco representing the boy Cuchullain taking arms. The Druid has warned him that the youth who takes arms that day will make his name famous, but will have a short life. And written round the fresco, in the old Irish words, was Cuchullain’s answer, “I care not if my life have only the span of a day and a night if my deeds be spoken of by the men of Ireland.” This was the spirit that Padraic Pearse sought to kindle in his boys—this was the spirit that he tried to bring back again into Ireland.

Thomas MacDonagh strove to create an Ireland that would be free as his intelligence was free, as eager for deeds as he himself was eager. Those who knew MacDonagh in his literary expression thought of him as a poet with a tendency towards abstractions, as a scholar with a bent towards philology. Those who knew him intimately knew him as a man who was the best of comrades. And they knew that there was something in MacDonagh that he never expressed. What was fundamental in him was an eager search for the thing to which he could give the whole devotion of his life. He found it in his vision of the Irish Republic.

Joseph Mary Plunkett strove to bring back the spirit and the defiance of the martyrs. He came of a family whose name has been in Irish history for six hundred years. The proudest memory of his people was the memory of martyrdom. The last priest martyred in England—the Venerable Oliver Plunkett—was of his blood.

These men, with their comrades—the good and brave Connolly, who gave all of his will and all of his ability to the workers of Ireland, the upright Eamonn Ceant, the soldierly O’Rahilly, the adventurous MacBride, Shaun MacDermott, “kindly Irish of the Irish,” and the others—have done a great thing for our country at this great moment of history.

They have made Ireland not a British question but a European question.

They have shown us that the country should be redeemed by the heroic spirit as well as by the political intelligence.

They have belittled danger and death for generations of Irish nationalists.

Bring Out Your Dead

Braithwaite’s Death-Cart

_The Poetry Review of America, edited by William Stanley
Braithwaite, Cambridge, Massachusetts._

The plague being upon us—God knows whence it came—the plague being upon us, poisoning men and women, and turning them into minor and sub-minor poets, and catching some in their youth so that they can never become men and women—the plague being upon us, I suppose there must be men brave enough to fashion death-carts for the corpses. It is a sanitary precaution. The more carts the better. The builders should be commended; the drivers medalled and ultimately pensioned. We should not bother much about the wheels—how they bang and rattle. Let the corpses leer and quarrel. But keep the carts well burdened and speed them to the pyres of oblivion.

This is not criticism, but the exaggeration of bitterness; and you, Mr. Braithwaite, should not complain if our lips writhe back at the cup which you have held out to us and if our tongues are twisted to a sincerity that sounds like malice. When _Contemporary Verse_ issued from Philadelphia like an ancient tumbril reconstructed by children we laughed and said, “God speed you while you last.” But when rumors came of a new poetry magazine in Boston we waited with the wonderful hope of eager youth. Ah, the new Poetry Review! The new Poetry Review! And what have you done? You have given us the old doll without even new tinsel. Do you wonder that I would smash your doll and tear its frayed and tawdry clothing?

“To serve the art we all love,” you say. Does Benjamin R. C. Low serve it with sentimental buncombe like _Jack O’Dreams_? Does Amelia Josephine Burr serve it with a library tragedy like _Vengeance_? And you, Mr. Braithwaite, do you serve it by writing a muddled article on _The Substance of Poetry_? The bad grammar and proofreading can be forgiven, but who can cleave his way through the jungle of incoherent thought? And I may add seriously that Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, with his puerile remarks about Shakespeare, sounds very much like your younger brother.

There is the beginning of service in the competently written criticisms by Messrs. Untermeyer, O’Brien and Colum, and especially in the tantalizing quotations in fine print from Donald Evan’s new book _Two_ _Deaths in the Bronx_. Amy Lowell contributes a short story in her recent colloquial vein and Sara Teasdale a sincere lyric.

If live men and women have been sand-bagged and put in the death-cart, let them awake and revive the corpses of their companions. Let them turn the cart into a tally-ho and gallop on with daring and exuberance, cracking a whip at critics.

I do not know your age, Mr. Braithwaite, but I feel that I have the wisdom of greater youth. You have not quite killed hope in me, for I know your true devotion to your work. What will you give us in the forthcoming numbers of your magazine?

MITCHELL DAWSON.

Herbert Tree’s “_Merchant of Venice_”

Could I invent some acid, bitter-stinging speech, some new tongue far beyond English in sharpness, I might begin to describe the spectacle of incredible vulgarity—of miserable intent and culmination—which is to be viewed upon the New Amsterdam stage this month. English shrinks—becomes the prattled language of babes—at thought of it.

Is the great wind which has blown the dust from the theatres of Germany, bearing Craig and Reinhart and Barker upon its back, echoing even here in America, to be completely discounted, silenced, by this vulgarian, this soulless, thoughtless, casual, shambling buffoon?

To _The Merchant of Venice_—a rambling, untidy comedy at best, a play for reading, or only to be played by a man of genius—he brings a graceless cast, a marvelous pot-pourri of music (tom-toms for “Morrocco” and Spanish jingles for “Arragon”), a quite distended and “improved” version of the original play, himself (God save us), and a theory of decoration quite incomprehensibly fearful. Brown palaces shaking to the conversation of the players—brown palaces with hangings of decayed green, a sham, paper Venice, elaborately stenciled, a Portia in landlady’s pink, a Jessica (a spirited Cockney girl) in Turkish costume, roysterers garbed with all the delicate art of Timbuctoo, a Shylock in old dressing gown. No detail, no fragment of the picture of vulgarity is lacking—from red-plush curtains to modern rattle-jacks for the Carnival, from mouthed speeches to maudlin groupings—a complete whole.

This to an apparently delighted audience, to a receptive press.

Barker departed from America, a semi-success, embittered towards us. _The Weavers_, finely played and brilliantly produced, clung to the shadow of an audience at the Garden Theatre, got as far as Chicago and failed completely there. The two great things in the theatre of the past year trodden out of sight of the easy public at the absurd and dolorous prancing, at the loud cajoling of popularity of bourgeois neighbor Tree.

How long is the theatre to cling to ragged precedent; to these mournful gentlemen of a dusty yesterday, raving through their paper and lattice Venices, showing us their entrail-colored Belmonts, barring sun and light and poetry and singing from the song-starved people of America?

ROLLO PETERS.

Some Imagist Poets, 1916[1]

MARY ALDIS

It is a matter of speculation why six poets of widely dissimilar viewpoints, if similar technique, should choose to band themselves together to publish in a yearly anthology selections from their works.

An examination into the prefaces and poems of the three anthologies sent forth by the Imagists and a study of various articles on the subject by individual members of the group fail to give adequate explanation.

The principle tenets of Imagism, i. e., clear presentation, the abolishing of outworn phrases and extra adjectives, the necessity of rhythm in all poetry, the absence of reflective comment, are those common to most of the modern serious writers of verse; and although the Imagists have done well to lay fresh emphasis on the difficulty and desirability of putting these tenets into practice, this hardly constitutes a new school. As for a definite understanding of the term Imagism, God help the man who thinks he can explain to another its meaning.

The Imagists, all six of them (there were more in the first anthology, but seemingly some fell from grace), write poetry. That they choose to employ a sub-title need not concern us; nor does their exposition of certain theoretical ideals. What does concern us is the quality of the poems they write. If it seems well to these six poets to publish together a collection of chosen poems, let us pay our seventy-five cents for the modest green paper volume, to read and re-read those that please us best; or, let us go our way untroubled, giving our affection to safe and sure collections—Rittenhouse, Braithwaite, or even good Edmund Clarence Stedman.

There is a patient note discernible in the preface of this third volume which seems to say, “Once again we will endeavor to make clear what we are trying to do. Kindly make an effort to understand.” One may question the desirability of any preface, but it is not surprising that the Imagists wish to make clear their aims and purposes. One wonders at the breath expended in attacks on them. There are disadvantages in this banding together: if one of the group makes a misstep the whole six are anathematized; but, after all, it is quite futile, this effort to kill by ridicule. Denunciation, however fierce, has never yet crushed anything which had in it the living flame of beauty, as much Imagist poetry has.

Miss Amy Lowell is represented in this 1916 Anthology by three poems. The first is her _Patterns_, named by Braithwaite as the first of the five best poems of 1915. It is difficult to quote, as the poem must be taken in its entirety to appreciate its beauty. Here are the first two stanzas:

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan.
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.

Studying it again one finds new beauties—the delicacy of the occasional rhyme, used as a musician uses the flute in an orchestra, the curious “pattern” of the rhythm, which cannot be defined and yet fits the theme with inimitable grace; the unforgettable picture of the garden with its stiff paths, its white fountain, its carelessly gorgeous flowers, and the woman walking down the path with slow and stately tread. Her head is straight and high, pink and silver is her stiff brocaded gown, yet one knows that underneath it throbs a human heart for which there is no place in the pattern. Here is certainly a new way of conveying emotion. We are stirred by the passion of the poem up to its terrible climax—“Christ! what are patterns for?”

A masterpiece this poem, one to learn and repeat and make one’s own. There follows by Miss Lowell _A Spring Day_ in polyphonic prose, a series of word pictures scintillating with color and dancing light. The day has five color divisions: the Bath, where “little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, and their reflections wabble deliciously over the ceiling”; the Breakfast Table, where golden coffee, yellow butter and silver and white make another symphony. Then comes the Walk, with more color, from boys with black and red, amber and blue marbles, “spitting crimson” when they are hit, to a man’s hat careering down the street in front of white dust “jarring the sunlight into spokes of rose-color and green.” Next comes Midday and Afternoon, then Night and Sleep. “Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue and purple dreams into my ears.... Pale blue lavender, you are the color of the sky when it is fresh-washed and fair.”

Miss Lowell also includes her amazing paraphrase of Stravinsky’s _Grotesques_, too amazing for an unmusical person’s comment.

Richard Aldington has seven poems. The finest is a short Elizabethan lyric named _After Two Years_. It is a lovely bit, but why it should be published in an “Imagist” collection no man may say. Its delicate beauty is indefinable.

After Two Years

She is all so slight
And tender and white
As a May morning.
She walks without hood
At dusk. It is good
To hear her sing.

It is God’s will
That I shall love her still
As He loves Mary.
And night and day
I will go forth to pray
That she loves me.

She is as gold
Lovely, and far more cold.
Do thou pray with me,
For if I win grace
To kiss twice her face
God has done well to me.

Aldington’s _Eros and Psyche_ has both beauty and distinction, but no one of the seven poems by him can compare with his _Choricos_ in the Anthology of 1915. That is an achievement not easily repeated.

Perhaps H. D. is the purest Imagist of the group. To the uninitiated she is the most obscure because the most abstract. She loves the sea and high, windy places and her poems catch something of the freshness one feels standing on a headland, beaten and buffeted by the wind and the salt spray. Nature is to her as a living presence, sometimes gentle, more often cruel. She vibrates to beauty as sensitively as a Greek dryad, and in reading her poems one has a curious sense of a worshipper offering incense to the gods. Here are some lines from the last one of the four poems she contributes. It is called _Temple—The Cliff_:

High—high and no hill-goat
Tramples—no mountain-sheep
Has set foot on your fine grass.
You lift, you are the world-edge,
Pillar for the sky-arch.

The world heaved—
We are next to the sky.
Over us, sea-hawks shout,
Gulls sweep past.
The terrible breakers are silent.

Shall I hurl myself from here.
Shall I leap and be nearer you?
Shall I drop, beloved, beloved.

Over me the wind swirls.
I have stood on your portal
And I know—
You are further than this,
Still further on another cliff.

In their passion for clearness, for the exact word, Imagists often use certain words which sound ugly. In this poem of fourteen stanzas, the word “lurch” occurs three times. It is not a pretty word, it does not suggest a graceful action, yet apparently no other will do.

John Gould Fletcher is, first of all, pictorial. His conception of Imagism differs slightly, it would seem, from his confreres. His imagination is so strong he sees significance in every changing image of this changing world. His rhythm is so vague that sometimes it is hardly discoverable. His poetry could be printed about as well in block as in line, as doubtless he would admit. He loves color—revels, glories, riots in color; and he has a way of seeing resemblances to dragons and serpents and other ungodly things in the simplest of natural phenomena—trees or clouds or rain or even sunrise. His vocabulary is astonishing. He plunges into a sea of words and plays with them, tossing them up like jewels to sparkle in the sun, or burying them in pits to see if they will still shine. He loves words, caresses them with a lover’s touch, kisses them for luck, and then hurls them together in such an incredible combination that the critics blink. A serious workman withal, with much to say seething in his mind and a determination to say it in his own way. There is perhaps no line in the six poems in this Anthology equal to the much-quoted “Vermillion pavilion against a jade balustrade.” _The Mexican Quarter_ is a poem of forty-two lines wherein is depicted and symbolized the very spirit of Mexican life and love. It ends with an unexpected little lyric. One can almost hear the twang of the guitar. Here is Fletcher’s picture of _An Unquiet Street_:

By day and night this street is not still:
Omnibuses with red tail-lamps,
Taxicabs with shiny eyes,
Rumble, shunning its ugliness.
It is corrugated with wheel-ruts,
It is dented and pockmarked with traffic,
If has no time for sleep.
It heaves its old scarred countenance
Skyward between the buildings
And never says a word.

On rainy nights
It dully gleams
Like the cold tarnished scales of a snake:
And over it hang arc-lamps,
Blue-white death-lilies on black stems.

I think only a poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling could see in our municipal arc lamps “blue-white death-lilies on black stems,” but I am going to look more carefully after this.

F. S. Flint has given us more beauty in his earlier work, notably in _London My Beautiful_ and _The Swan_, than is to be found here, save perhaps in _Chalfont Saint Giles_, which has simplicity and dignified stateliness. It is a picture of village folk gravely filing into church, past ivy and lilac, as the bell rings. The sadness of England in war-time is in the picture. Here are two stanzas:

Walk quietly
along the mossy paths;
the stones of the humble dead
are hidden behind the blue mantle
of their forget-me-nots;
and before one grave so hidden
a widow kneels, with head bowed,
and the crape falling
over her shoulders.

The bells for evening church are ringing,
and the people come gravely
and with red, sun-burnt faces
through the gates in the wall.