"The urchins of the sky,
Drying their wings from storms and things
So they again can fly."
It is difficult to enunciate the words in such lines as:
"With my two bosomed blossoms gay"
"Like rivers sweet and steep,
Deep rock-clefts before my feet"
"You were a girl-child slight."
One is disaffected even in the mood of informal discursiveness by adjacent terminal words such as calculation, Appalachian; whole, jowl; ore, floor; trial, vile; fire, the higher; and
"Join hands,
Poets,
Companions"
is a metrical barbarism. Why, in a Dirge for a Righteous Kitten, "His shirt was always laundried well"? What of the prose lines, "A special tang for those who are tasty"? And in the phrase, "when the statue of Andrew Jackson . . . is removed," we have that popular weak misuse of the present tense which we have in such an expression as "I hope he gets there." There is a lack of neat thinking in such phrases as "Lining his shelves with books from everywhere" and "All in the name of this or that grim flag." There is inexactness of meaning in
"The long handclasp you gave
Still shakes upon my hands."
Usefulness is contradicted by the copybook concept of Dante:
"Would we were lean and grim, and shaken with hate
Like Dante, fugitive, o’erwrought with cares,"
