inquiring with earnest frivolity into the mysteries of art and into the natures which "we best give the clouds to keep." In the second place, I doubted whether Don Marquis could have answered my question if I had ventured to put it to him, and if he had cared to try.
He interested me, indeed, because he is, I suspect, like most modernized and well sophisticated men, a good bit puzzled himself by what he is. In several of the most striking of his personal poems he exhibits a kind of desperate amusement and bewilderment over the classical task of self-knowledge. Something—what is it?—has knocked our tight, snug little personalities to pieces. We see our fragments strewn all about us; but where is our core? In "Heir and Serf" Don Marquis speaks of his Self as "a chance loose knot in the skein of life where myriad selves combine"; he feels a heart quivering "with hatred not mine own"; he thinks of his Self as a house haunted by old doubts, old faiths, old lusts of the blood, unreconciled, and he ends his rummaging from basement to garret of that ancestral dwelling of spirit and flesh which he inhabits with a blank question—"What is this Self of mine?"
If the occupant of the tenement doesn't know, what should I learn by knocking at his door? Shall I turn to another poem called "The Struggle"? It describes a terrific combat with a spirit in a Dantean "dark valley" under frowning cliffs, a combat terminating in the death of the fell adversary, but—"He that lay upon the ground was—I!" That suggests much. So does the poem called "The Jesters," which speaks of disillusions and acrid tears and numb moments of despair, drowned in "an incorrigible mirth." So does
