POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
away from the bogs. His art lacks mass and weight, perhaps—it is a white-sailed sloop racing over the deep waters of his theme, not a heavy brig or a steel freighter, veterans of storms. The democracy it expresses is the democracy of a sensitive aristocrat who feels through imagination, not that of a hard man of the people who feels through knowledge. There is not, in Mr. Bynner, such richness and fullness of experience of life as in Whitman or Mark Twain, or that more modern democrat Edgar Lee Masters; and thus his poem lacks the breadth and bigness of the works of these.
But it has great beauty, at times a lyric ecstacy, a note clear, fine, pure. It not only achieves with felicity its spiritual motive, but incidentally sketches with light strokes a few living figures—the steel-worker, the two brothers, and even Celia, who, though dimmed by certain speeches, is at times vivid in superlative loveliness.
Having printed eight pages of this poem last April, we will pause now merely for a salutation:
The wind of death is a bright kiss
Upon the lips
Of every immigrant, as upon yours and mine—
Theirs is the stinging brine
And sun and open sea,
And theirs the arching sky, eternity.
Who can review a book like this? It would be like analyzing the flowers of June, for Mrs. Filsinger's lyrics have the clarity, the precision, the grace and fragrance of flowers.
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