AN EAGLE IN THE RING
Collected Poems. By Vachel Lindsay. 8vo. 290 pages. The Macmillan Company. $3.50.
THE outstanding impression made by Mr Lindsay's collected poems is that the author pities the fallen, deplores misunderstandings, and is saddened that the spirit should so often be at the mercy of the body. One cannot but revere his instinctive charity and determination to make a benevolent ordering of the universe possible. One knows that it is not an assumed attitude which leads Mr Lindsay to say:
"I want live things in their pride to remain.
I will not kill one grasshopper vain,
Thoyuh he eats a hole in my shirt like a door.
I let him out, give him one chance more."
"Love's a gamble, say you. I deny.
Love's a gift. I love you till I die.
Gamblers fight like rats. I will not play.
All I ever had I gave away."
It is a fine courage that enables a writer to let himself loose in the religious revival sense of the term at the risk of being thought an unintentional clown. It is impossible not to respect Mr Lindsay's preoccupation with humanitarianism, but at the same time to deplore his lack of aesthetic rigour. In a lover of the chant, one expects a metronomelike exactness of ear; it is the exception, however, when the concluding lines of Mr Lindsay's stanzas are not like a top which totters, or a hoop which rolls crazily before it finally stops. We have:
"Murdered in filth in a day,
Somehow by the merchant gay!"
and as the final lines of a poem:
