comparison is simultaneously provoked, with E. E. Cummings and with Poe. The Fairy Bridal Hymn embodies without the aureole of distinguished effect of separateness, the feeling in Blake's account of a fairy's funeral and in The Wedding of the Lotus and the Rose, the lines:
"Above the drownèd ages,
A wind of wooing blows,"
unconsciously to Mr Lindsay no doubt, but suicidally, recall Swinburne.
Although it was not intended that the poems should be read to oneself, they will, on occasion, be so read, and so surely as they are it is inevitable that the author will in certain respects be presented amiss. Certain repetitions suggest the pleonasm of the illiterate preacher who repeats a phrase in order to get time to formulate another:
"Love is not velvet, not all of it velvet"
"When a million million years were done
And a million million years beside,"
We have not that reinforcing of sentiment which we have in reiteration by Yeats:
"She pulled the thread and bit the thread,
And made a golden gown."
In his essay on Poetic Diction, Robert Bridges says, "the higher the poet's command of diction, the wider may be the field of his Properties; . . . and this is a very practical point, if a writer with no command of imaginative diction, should use such Properties as are difficult of harmonization, he will discredit both the Properties and the Diction." Despite the fact that Mr Lindsay's properties are abundant and often harmonious as in the fantasy of the gipsies:
"Dressed, as of old, like turkey-cocks and zebras,
Like tiger-lilies and chameleons,"
