"I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent than it is dim"
(how like Valery's "entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes" or like his "eternellement, Eternellement le bout mordre").
And also they cannot imitate her animals and birds—
"the parrakeet—
. . . destroying
bark and portions of the food it could not eat."
Mr Wescott, if he agrees with all or even with a part of what I have written, will probably consider it as an affirmation of his belief in a kind of "aristocratic" art drawing no sustenance from the soil. "An aristocratic art, emulating the condition of ritual." But of course all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. And nothing belongs more properly to the people than ritual—or indeed than aristocracy itself, a popular invention to serve popular needs. (I suppose the Ku Klux Klan is a popular ritual—as popular as a ritual can be in a country where there are only variations within the middle class.) Miss Moore's relation to the soil is not a simple one, or rather it is to various soils—to that of Latium and to that of Attica I believe (or at least to that of the Aegean littoral) as well as most positively to the soil (well top-dressed) of America. There are several reasons (buried in this essay) why Miss Moore's poetry is almost completely neglected in England, beside the simple reason that it is too good, "in this age of hard striving," to be appreciated anywhere.
And there is one final, and "magnificent" compliment: Miss Moore's poetry is as "feminine" as Christina Rossetti's, one never forgets that it is written by a woman; but with both one never thinks of this particularity as anything but a positive virtue.
