American nights entertainment
are reading _The White Flag_ will accept this as so.
Books by Gene Stratton-Porter
1903 _The Song of the Cardinal_
1904 _Freckles_
1907 _What I Have Done With Birds_ (republished, 1917,
as _Friends in Feathers_)
1908 _At the Foot of the Rainbow_
1909 _A Girl of the Limberlost_
1909 _Birds of the Bible_
1910 _Music of the Wild_
1911 _The Harvester_
1912 _Moths of the Limberlost_
1913 _Laddie_
1915 _Michael O’Halloran_
1916 _Morning Face_
1918 _A Daughter of the Land_
1920 _Homing With the Birds_
1921 _Her Father’s Daughter_
1922 _The Fire Bird_
1923 _White Flag_
_Euphorbia_ appeared as a serial in Good Housekeeping:
January, February, March numbers, 1923.
Sources on Gene Stratton-Porter
_Gene Stratton-Porter, A Little Story of Her Life and Work._ This
is the booklet, now out of print, published some ten years ago by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, based upon the long self-account written by
Mrs. Porter and prepared by Eugene F. Saxton.
“An American Bird-Woman.” Anonymous article in CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
(London and Edinburgh. New York: International News Company), Part 46,
October 1, 1914: page 636.
Private Information.
_17. Poetry and Plays_
i
If you look at the poets as they move in their procession before
your eyes, you will see that each is dressed after the manner of his
age--the Elizabethans in starched ruffs; the men of the Eighteenth
Century in knee-breeches; the men of today in Homburg hats. And if
you listen to their verses you will hear that each composes, too,
after the manner of his age. For there have been fashions in poetry
as there have been fashions in dress, and you can tell the period of
a poem not only by the name and date of the poet but by the style and
flavour of the poetry.” From this thought J. F. Roxburgh has written
“a beginner’s introduction to English poetry” with the charming title,
_The Poetic Procession_. His brief review of the poets from the
Elizabethans to the men now writing is felicitous enough. But although
I am sure his intention in the sentences quoted was not literal, the
image of present-day poets in Homburg hats is very disconcerting.
Don Marquis has probably worn one, thus inviting the visitation of
insurance agents. But I am sure some of his poems have been written
with the wind blowing through his hair. Such poems as “The Name,” in
his _Dreams and Dust_, for example, or those “Premonitions” in his
_Poems and Portraits_. It is as difficult to say, with Marquis, where
the humourist stops in his poetry and the thinker steps in as to mark
the same exit-entrance in the man’s prose. _Sonnets to a Red-Haired
Lady and Famous Love Affairs_ and a part of _Poems and Portraits_ are
supposed to belong to Marquis the jester; but, of the second-named
book, which part? “The man who has laughed lest he should weep, the
clown of the seven times broken heart” is Richard Le Gallienne’s apt
characterisation of Marquis. I am not sure that “The Tom Cat” in _Poems
and Portraits_ is a bit less “serious” than such a poem as “Inhibition”
in the same collection.
Behind the placid front of use
The baffled whims move to and fro;
We fear to let these genii go....
Sober-faced, we carry hidden within us something for which the poet has
found one of those rare things in the language, the perfect phrase; it
is
The golden nonsense of the heart.
Perhaps we also are like the Tom-cat and, on our occasions, “chant the
hate of a million years.”
He will lie on a rug to-morrow
And lick his silky fur,
And veil the brute in his yellow eyes
And play he’s tame, and purr.
But at midnight in the alley
He will crouch again and wail,
And beat the time for his demon’s song
With the swing of his demon’s tail.
I am as certain that Marquis admires and condones the Tom-cat as I am
that he has sought the troubling and elusive “Name” which has variously
seemed, as he tells us in his fine poem, to be Love, and Beauty, and
God.
The Boston Evening Transcript spoke not long ago of “the unhurried
ascent of John Hall Wheelock to the highest rank among contemporary
American poets.” The statement seems to me free from any exaggeration;
and it is encouraging to think that Mr. Wheelock is in a way to reach
the height more conspicuously than did Edwin Arlington Robinson, of
whom, until his unveiling a few years ago by fellow poets, the larger
public seems to have remained in a lamentable ignorance. Mr. Wheelock’s
_Dust and Light_ (1919) and his _The Black Panther_ (1922) have a
beauty and sentience best illustrated by quotation. Here are some lines
from “Earth,” in _Dust and Light_:
Deftly does the dust express
In mind her hidden loveliness,
And from her cool silence stream
The cricket’s cry and Dante’s dream;
For the earth that breeds the trees
Breeds cities too, and symphonies.
Equally her beauty flows
Into a saviour, or a rose--
Looks down in dream, and from above
Smiles at herself in Jesus’s love.
Christ’s love and Homer’s art
Are but the workings of her heart;
Through Leonardo’s hand she seeks
Herself, and through Beethoven speaks
In holy thunderings around
The awful message of the ground.
The thought is Emersonian, but with Emerson lyricism was a doubtful
and an inconstant capture. Here is “The Lion-House,” from _The Black
Panther_, a poem, I cannot but think, that any poet would be proud to
sign:
Always the heavy air,
The dreadful cage, the low
Murmur of voices, where
Some Force goes to and fro
In an immense despair!
As through a haunted brain--
With tireless footfalls
The Obsession moves again,
Trying the floor, the walls,
Forever, but in vain.
In vain, proud Force! A might
Shrewder than yours, did spin
Around your rage that bright
Prison of steel, wherein
You pace for my delight.
And O, my heart, what Doom
What warier Will has wrought
The cage, within whose room
Paces your burning thought,
For the delight of Whom?
The black and silver of cover and jacket on Elinor Wylie’s second book
of poems, _Black Armour_, were not so much to match the title as to
convey the colour impression of a number of readers who had studied
the book in manuscript. The poems, grouped under the names of the
parts of a suit of armour--Breastplate, Gauntlet, Helmet, Beaver Up,
Plumes--perhaps require study, not in the sense of textual analysis
(though they will repay that) but in the sense of returning to them
several times, so that their compressed emotion may fully expand
itself. I had almost said, explode itself. Indeed, it may sometimes
produce nothing short of an explosion of feeling in the sensitive
reader. I am thinking now of such works as “Now That Your Eyes Are
Shut” (which opens the section called Plumes). I have heard the poem
“Peregrine” called the best in the book, the dryly concise account of a
Liar and bragger,
He had no friend
Except a dagger
And a candle-end
and whose career, the narration of which includes a dozen feats of
rhyming, was summed up when
He spoke this sentence
With a princely air:
“The noose draws tighter;
This is the end;
I’m a good fighter,
But a bad friend:
I’ve played the traitor
Over and over;
I’m a good hater,
But a bad lover.”
But “Fable,” with its effects in twenty-four lines as powerful as
Coleridge’s in his _Ancient Mariner_, and “Lucifer Sings in Secret” are
to me finer than “Peregrine” because more individual. I mean that I
could imagine a later Browning writing “Peregrine,” but cannot imagine
anyone but Elinor Wylie writing “Lucifer.” Much stress has been laid
on Mrs. Wylie’s gift for bright, strange images in her poetry, and this
is no small item in her genius; but the steeled emotion, the unearthly
cry that is heard under the burnished and metallic surfaces, sometimes
in not instantly intelligible words, is her voice as a poet. In “Now
That Your Eyes Are Shut,” which I quote, there is one stanza that might
have been written by a poet of a long-past century--I leave you to name
him--but there are two stanzas, the most important, which I can imagine
no one but Elinor Wylie writing:
Now that your eyes are shut
Not even a dusty butterfly may brush them;
My flickering knife has cut
Life from sonorous lion throats to hush them.
If pigeons croon too loud
Or lambs bleat proudly, they must come to slaughter,
And I command each cloud
To be precise in spilling silent water.
Let light forbear those lids:
I have forbidden the feathery ash to smutch them;
The spider thread that thrids
The gray-plumed grass has not my leave to touch them.
My casual ghost may slip,
Issuing tiptoe, from the pure inhuman;
The tissues of my lip
Will bruise your eyelids, while I am a woman.
ii
The title poem in Amanda Hall’s book, _The Dancer in the Shrine_,
tempts to quotation, but there seems to me something unfair in
reprinting it complete and to cut lines from it is to mutilate both
what is taken and that which is left. There is a good deal of the life
of the countryside in the book; Miss Hall’s New England is that of
Thoreau but her lyrical gift is distinctly personal. A characteristic
mood and treatment is shown in “I’ll Build My House of Sticks and
Stones,” from which the following couplets are taken:
I’ll build my house of sticks and stones,
Of lollypops and herring bones,
None other than myself to please--
Of fine, fresh straw or green sage cheese;
I’ll build my house of this and that
To suit my pleasure and my cat--
I’ll clothe myself in cast-off rags,
In cobwebs or in barley bags,
The shabbier I am encased
The fruitier my joy will taste.
I’ll set my two lips to the air
And carol to the birds’ despair....
Some musing morning as I sing
Perhaps I’ll catch God listening,
In soft enchantment at His sill.
He’ll tell His angels to be still,
He’ll say to them in tones discreet
That there is singing in the street...
The pagan quality keeps its joyousness while transmuting it into
something reverent and beautiful in such lines as “The Dancer in the
Shrine.” The religious note, differently accented, may be found in
the work of Alice Meynell, whose complete verse is now available in
_The Poems of Alice Meynell_. Mrs. Meynell’s death has brought a sharp
emphasis upon the rare character of her poetic gift. Alfred Noyes says
she has left to the world a volume “containing only masterpieces,” but
I like better the words of J. L. Garvin: “Not one of her poems but
was the music of a thought as most of her essays were the fruit of
perception.” Let me not quote “The Shepherdess,” so widely known and so
self-expressive, but “Chimes” with its changing image and its “music of
a thought” sung to perfection:
Brief, on a flying night,
From the shaken tower,
A flock of bells take flight,
And go with the hour.
Like birds from the cote to the gales,
Abrupt--O hark!
A fleet of bells set sails,
And go to the dark.
Sudden the cold airs swing.
Alone, aloud,
A verse of bells takes wing
And flies with the cloud.
Mrs. Meynell was one of a group of contemporary Catholic poets of whom,
it may be, Aline Kilmer is the most widely known and read in America.
Of the others of that group I should like especially to mention two
whose new books of verse have just appeared--Sister M. Madeleva, a
nun in the congregation of the Holy Cross at Holy Rosary Academy,
California, and Wilfred Rowland Childe, who is English. Sister M.
Madeleva’s collection called _Knights Errant_ contains verse highly
spiritual in type, clear and strong in emotional expression, and