POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
Shall Godhead dream a transient thing?
Strives He for that which now He lacks?
Shall Laws dominion melt as wax
At touch of Hope's irradiant wing?
Are these the towers His hands have wrought?
Dreams He the dream of end and plan
Dear to the finity of man?
And shall mutation rule His thought?
If I dwell upon this early poem, it is because the best and worst qualities of the poet are in it. His later work never gives us such a hint of grandeur, or falls into deeper abysses of rhetoric. A Wine of Wizardry leaves me cold. I don't care whether
So Fancy's carvel seeks an isle afar
Led by the Scorpion's rubescent star,
or whether
She wanders to an iceberg oriflammed
With rayed auroral guidons of the North.
In fact, I cannot follow the poor lady's meanderings through a maze of words. And although the next hook, The House of Orchids, contains a good poem in simpler diction, The Faun, and two or three fine sonnets, especially Aldebaran at Dusk, it does not fulfil the promise of the first volume. Nor does the latest book.
Beyond the Breakers begins thus:
The world was full of the sound of a great wind out of the West,
And the tracks of its test were white on the trampled oceans breast.
And I said, "With the sea and wind I will mix my body and soul,
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