The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/An Eagle in the Ring
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:
"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,"
As a visionary, as an interpreter of America, and as a modern primitive—in what are regarded as the three provinces of his power, Mr Lindsay is hampered to the point of self-destruction by his imperviousness to the need for aesthetic self-discipline. Many poets have thoughts that are similar, in which case, only heedlessness prevents the author of the less perfect product from giving place to the author of the stronger, and much of Mr Lindsay's collected work is unfortunate in thus provoking comparison with attested greatness. Unfortunate also, is the conscious altering of great familiar expressions:
"The times are out of joint! O cursed spite!
The noble jester Yorick comes no more"
"What Nations sow, they must expect to reap"
"Within the many mansions,
[the hosts] . . .
Slept long by crooning springs."
"Did you waste much money
To deck a leper's feast"
and the context, provoke comparison with The Vision of Sir Launfal. In The Mysterious Cat, the line repeated three times, "Did you ever hear of a thing like that," recalls The Three Blind Mice; Eden in Winter recalls Ralph Hodgson's Eve. Star of My Heart, At Mass, and Foreign Missions in Battle Array, recall such classics as We Three Kings of Orient Are and Onward Christian Soldiers, and The Last Song of Lucifer seems like a mild transcript of Paradise Lost.
"In that strange curling of her lips,
That happy curling of her lips,"
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,"
the grouping is often conspicuously self-destructive. One feels that
"Percival and Bedivere
And Nogi side by side"
distract one from the poet's meaning as do the statesmen, artists, and sages, in The Litany of the Heroes: Amenophis Fourth—Hamlet and Keats "in one"—Moses, Confucius, Alexander, Caesar, St Paul, "Augustine," Mohammed, St Francis, Dante, Columbus, Titian, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Napoleon, Darwin, Lincoln, Emerson, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates. Like paintings in public buildings of the world's cultural and scientific progress, such groups sacrifice impact to inclusiveness. Johnny Appleseed is marred, one feels, by such phrases as "the bouncing moon," and
"He laid him down sweetly, . . .
Like a bump on a log, like a stone washed white."
We rejoice in the resilience of imagination in the idea of a grasshopper as "the Brownies' racehorse," "the fairies' Kangaroo"; and in The Golden Whales of California, there is controlled extravagance in the enumeration of "the swine with velvet ears," "the sacred raisins," "the trees which climb so high the crows are dizzy," "the snake fried in the desert," but "the biggest ocean in the world," and the whales "whooping that their souls are free," suggest the tired European's idea of America and the fantasy which visualizes St Francis in the mere literal appropriateness of an etymological pun, offends by its conception of:
"The venturesome lovers . . .
In a year and a month and a day of sailing
Leaving the whales and their whoop unfailing
On through the lightning, ice and confusion
North of the North Pole,
South of the South Pole
And west of the west of the west of the west."
Objecting further, it is impossible not to say that Mr Lindsay's phrases of negro dialect are a deep disappointment. A familiarity with negros and the fact that the adaptations are intentional cannot absolve such Aryan doggerel as:
"And we fell by the altar
And we fell by the aisle,
And found our Savior
In just a little while."
Such lines are startlingly at variance with real negro parallelism as we have it in:
"Oh, Hell am deep 'n Hell am wide
an' you can't touch bottom on either side"
and are incompatible with that perfect fragment of negro cadence which Mr Lindsay has combined with it, "Every time I hear the spirit moving in my heart I'll pray." A stentorianly emphatic combining of the elements of the black genius and the white, but emphasizes their incompatibility. In The Congo, the "Baboon butler in the agate door," "And hats that were covered with diamond-dust" are pale substitutes for
"Baboon butler at the door,
Diamond carpet on the floor."
In the Booker Washington Trilogy,
"the oak secure,
Weaving its leafy lure,
Dreaming by fountains pure
Ten thousand years"
recalls The Charge of the Light Brigade. The Daniel, and Simon Legree have intermittently fantasy and beat, but the refrain, fabricated or authentic, "Let Samson be coming into your mind" is inexplicable from any point of view. In stage directions, the most expert craftsmen such as Shaw and Yeats barely escape pedantry and one feels that however necessary to Mr Lindsay's conception of the spoken word particular information may be, when he asks us "to keep as lightfooted as possible," to read "orotund fashion," "with heavy buzzing bass," et cetera, one can but feel, unfairly or not, that he is subordinating a poorly endowed audience to wit which he proposes to furnish.
Some of Mr Lindsay's work would lead one to infer that "a man is out on three wide balls but walks on four good strikes." The literary reader tends not to be compensated by moral fervour for technical misapprehensions, but there is life in any kind of beauty and in these poems avoidance of grossness and the entirely vengeful, is fortifying. Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket is full of contagious vigour:
"I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness,"
but in his Curse for Kings, Mr Lindsay gives the effect of an emotional pacifism which is incompatible with earnestness.
This whole book is a weapon in a strenuous battlefield," Mr Lindsay says; "practically every copy will be first opened on the lap of some person . . . trying to follow me as I recite as one follows the translation of the opera libretto." He is not to be refuted. There is a perhaps not very exact analogy between him in his rôle of undismayed, national interpreter, and a certain young eagle conveyed by American naval officers to the Philippines, styled "an American rooster," and pitted invariably with mortal consequence against Philippine gamecocks.
If a reader felt no responsibility for a writer, and were merely culling felicities, certain of Mr Lindsay's poems would undoubtedly give complete pleasure; disregarding as a whole the poem, How a Little Girl Danced, there is a fine accuracy in the lines:
"With foot like the snow, and with step like the rain."
There is suggested fragility in the poem game of yellow butterflies:
"They shiver by the shallow pools. . . .
They drink and drink. A frail pretense!"
There is beauty in The Dandelion; especially also, in The Flower of Mending:
"When moths have marred the overcoat
Of tender Mr Mouse."
And the lines:
"Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
are expertly captivating. Lincoln is not added to, but he is not travestied in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight; there is glory in the conception of. Alexander Campbell stepping "from out the Brush Run Meeting House": and reality in Bryan:
"With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear. . . .
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck."
We have in this poem, some of Gertrude Stein's power of "telling what you are being while you are doing what you are doing," and there is "blood within the rhyme" in:
"The banjos rattled and the tamborines
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens."