Part 3

Herbert Tree’s “_Merchant of Venice_”

Could I invent some acid, bitter-stinging speech, some new tongue far beyond English in sharpness, I might begin to describe the spectacle of incredible vulgarity—of miserable intent and culmination—which is to be viewed upon the New Amsterdam stage this month. English shrinks—becomes the prattled language of babes—at thought of it.

Is the great wind which has blown the dust from the theatres of Germany, bearing Craig and Reinhart and Barker upon its back, echoing even here in America, to be completely discounted, silenced, by this vulgarian, this soulless, thoughtless, casual, shambling buffoon?

To _The Merchant of Venice_—a rambling, untidy comedy at best, a play for reading, or only to be played by a man of genius—he brings a graceless cast, a marvelous pot-pourri of music (tom-toms for “Morrocco” and Spanish jingles for “Arragon”), a quite distended and “improved” version of the original play, himself (God save us), and a theory of decoration quite incomprehensibly fearful. Brown palaces shaking to the conversation of the players—brown palaces with hangings of decayed green, a sham, paper Venice, elaborately stenciled, a Portia in landlady’s pink, a Jessica (a spirited Cockney girl) in Turkish costume, roysterers garbed with all the delicate art of Timbuctoo, a Shylock in old dressing gown. No detail, no fragment of the picture of vulgarity is lacking—from red-plush curtains to modern rattle-jacks for the Carnival, from mouthed speeches to maudlin groupings—a complete whole.

This to an apparently delighted audience, to a receptive press.

Barker departed from America, a semi-success, embittered towards us. _The Weavers_, finely played and brilliantly produced, clung to the shadow of an audience at the Garden Theatre, got as far as Chicago and failed completely there. The two great things in the theatre of the past year trodden out of sight of the easy public at the absurd and dolorous prancing, at the loud cajoling of popularity of bourgeois neighbor Tree.

How long is the theatre to cling to ragged precedent; to these mournful gentlemen of a dusty yesterday, raving through their paper and lattice Venices, showing us their entrail-colored Belmonts, barring sun and light and poetry and singing from the song-starved people of America?

ROLLO PETERS.

Some Imagist Poets, 1916[1]

MARY ALDIS

It is a matter of speculation why six poets of widely dissimilar viewpoints, if similar technique, should choose to band themselves together to publish in a yearly anthology selections from their works.

An examination into the prefaces and poems of the three anthologies sent forth by the Imagists and a study of various articles on the subject by individual members of the group fail to give adequate explanation.

The principle tenets of Imagism, i. e., clear presentation, the abolishing of outworn phrases and extra adjectives, the necessity of rhythm in all poetry, the absence of reflective comment, are those common to most of the modern serious writers of verse; and although the Imagists have done well to lay fresh emphasis on the difficulty and desirability of putting these tenets into practice, this hardly constitutes a new school. As for a definite understanding of the term Imagism, God help the man who thinks he can explain to another its meaning.

The Imagists, all six of them (there were more in the first anthology, but seemingly some fell from grace), write poetry. That they choose to employ a sub-title need not concern us; nor does their exposition of certain theoretical ideals. What does concern us is the quality of the poems they write. If it seems well to these six poets to publish together a collection of chosen poems, let us pay our seventy-five cents for the modest green paper volume, to read and re-read those that please us best; or, let us go our way untroubled, giving our affection to safe and sure collections—Rittenhouse, Braithwaite, or even good Edmund Clarence Stedman.

There is a patient note discernible in the preface of this third volume which seems to say, “Once again we will endeavor to make clear what we are trying to do. Kindly make an effort to understand.” One may question the desirability of any preface, but it is not surprising that the Imagists wish to make clear their aims and purposes. One wonders at the breath expended in attacks on them. There are disadvantages in this banding together: if one of the group makes a misstep the whole six are anathematized; but, after all, it is quite futile, this effort to kill by ridicule. Denunciation, however fierce, has never yet crushed anything which had in it the living flame of beauty, as much Imagist poetry has.

Miss Amy Lowell is represented in this 1916 Anthology by three poems. The first is her _Patterns_, named by Braithwaite as the first of the five best poems of 1915. It is difficult to quote, as the poem must be taken in its entirety to appreciate its beauty. Here are the first two stanzas:

I walk down the garden paths, And all the daffodils Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. I walk down the patterned garden paths In my stiff, brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jewelled fan. I too am a rare Pattern. As I wander down The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured, And the train Makes a pink and silver stain On the gravel, and the thrift Of the borders. Just a plate of current fashion, Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. Not a softness anywhere about me, Only whale-bone and brocade.

Studying it again one finds new beauties—the delicacy of the occasional rhyme, used as a musician uses the flute in an orchestra, the curious “pattern” of the rhythm, which cannot be defined and yet fits the theme with inimitable grace; the unforgettable picture of the garden with its stiff paths, its white fountain, its carelessly gorgeous flowers, and the woman walking down the path with slow and stately tread. Her head is straight and high, pink and silver is her stiff brocaded gown, yet one knows that underneath it throbs a human heart for which there is no place in the pattern. Here is certainly a new way of conveying emotion. We are stirred by the passion of the poem up to its terrible climax—“Christ! what are patterns for?”

A masterpiece this poem, one to learn and repeat and make one’s own. There follows by Miss Lowell _A Spring Day_ in polyphonic prose, a series of word pictures scintillating with color and dancing light. The day has five color divisions: the Bath, where “little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, and their reflections wabble deliciously over the ceiling”; the Breakfast Table, where golden coffee, yellow butter and silver and white make another symphony. Then comes the Walk, with more color, from boys with black and red, amber and blue marbles, “spitting crimson” when they are hit, to a man’s hat careering down the street in front of white dust “jarring the sunlight into spokes of rose-color and green.” Next comes Midday and Afternoon, then Night and Sleep. “Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue and purple dreams into my ears.... Pale blue lavender, you are the color of the sky when it is fresh-washed and fair.”

Miss Lowell also includes her amazing paraphrase of Stravinsky’s _Grotesques_, too amazing for an unmusical person’s comment.

Richard Aldington has seven poems. The finest is a short Elizabethan lyric named _After Two Years_. It is a lovely bit, but why it should be published in an “Imagist” collection no man may say. Its delicate beauty is indefinable.

After Two Years

She is all so slight And tender and white As a May morning. She walks without hood At dusk. It is good To hear her sing.

It is God’s will That I shall love her still As He loves Mary. And night and day I will go forth to pray That she loves me.

She is as gold Lovely, and far more cold. Do thou pray with me, For if I win grace To kiss twice her face God has done well to me.

Aldington’s _Eros and Psyche_ has both beauty and distinction, but no one of the seven poems by him can compare with his _Choricos_ in the Anthology of 1915. That is an achievement not easily repeated.

Perhaps H. D. is the purest Imagist of the group. To the uninitiated she is the most obscure because the most abstract. She loves the sea and high, windy places and her poems catch something of the freshness one feels standing on a headland, beaten and buffeted by the wind and the salt spray. Nature is to her as a living presence, sometimes gentle, more often cruel. She vibrates to beauty as sensitively as a Greek dryad, and in reading her poems one has a curious sense of a worshipper offering incense to the gods. Here are some lines from the last one of the four poems she contributes. It is called _Temple—The Cliff_:

High—high and no hill-goat Tramples—no mountain-sheep Has set foot on your fine grass. You lift, you are the world-edge, Pillar for the sky-arch.

The world heaved— We are next to the sky. Over us, sea-hawks shout, Gulls sweep past. The terrible breakers are silent.

Shall I hurl myself from here. Shall I leap and be nearer you? Shall I drop, beloved, beloved.

Over me the wind swirls. I have stood on your portal And I know— You are further than this, Still further on another cliff.

In their passion for clearness, for the exact word, Imagists often use certain words which sound ugly. In this poem of fourteen stanzas, the word “lurch” occurs three times. It is not a pretty word, it does not suggest a graceful action, yet apparently no other will do.

John Gould Fletcher is, first of all, pictorial. His conception of Imagism differs slightly, it would seem, from his confreres. His imagination is so strong he sees significance in every changing image of this changing world. His rhythm is so vague that sometimes it is hardly discoverable. His poetry could be printed about as well in block as in line, as doubtless he would admit. He loves color—revels, glories, riots in color; and he has a way of seeing resemblances to dragons and serpents and other ungodly things in the simplest of natural phenomena—trees or clouds or rain or even sunrise. His vocabulary is astonishing. He plunges into a sea of words and plays with them, tossing them up like jewels to sparkle in the sun, or burying them in pits to see if they will still shine. He loves words, caresses them with a lover’s touch, kisses them for luck, and then hurls them together in such an incredible combination that the critics blink. A serious workman withal, with much to say seething in his mind and a determination to say it in his own way. There is perhaps no line in the six poems in this Anthology equal to the much-quoted “Vermillion pavilion against a jade balustrade.” _The Mexican Quarter_ is a poem of forty-two lines wherein is depicted and symbolized the very spirit of Mexican life and love. It ends with an unexpected little lyric. One can almost hear the twang of the guitar. Here is Fletcher’s picture of _An Unquiet Street_:

By day and night this street is not still: Omnibuses with red tail-lamps, Taxicabs with shiny eyes, Rumble, shunning its ugliness. It is corrugated with wheel-ruts, It is dented and pockmarked with traffic, If has no time for sleep. It heaves its old scarred countenance Skyward between the buildings And never says a word.

On rainy nights It dully gleams Like the cold tarnished scales of a snake: And over it hang arc-lamps, Blue-white death-lilies on black stems.

I think only a poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling could see in our municipal arc lamps “blue-white death-lilies on black stems,” but I am going to look more carefully after this.

F. S. Flint has given us more beauty in his earlier work, notably in _London My Beautiful_ and _The Swan_, than is to be found here, save perhaps in _Chalfont Saint Giles_, which has simplicity and dignified stateliness. It is a picture of village folk gravely filing into church, past ivy and lilac, as the bell rings. The sadness of England in war-time is in the picture. Here are two stanzas:

Walk quietly along the mossy paths; the stones of the humble dead are hidden behind the blue mantle of their forget-me-nots; and before one grave so hidden a widow kneels, with head bowed, and the crape falling over her shoulders.

The bells for evening church are ringing, and the people come gravely and with red, sun-burnt faces through the gates in the wall.

D. H. Lawrence contributes what may be considered, except for _Patterns_, the most notable poem in the book, _Erinnyes_, although again why it should be called Imagism is a mystery. It is certainly, however, a poem, and a profound and beautiful one. In its form and its long, slow, melancholy rhythm it suggests Aldington’s _Choricos_, and the theme is the same—Death. Here are five stanzas:

There are so many dead, Many have died unconsenting, Theirs ghosts are angry, unappeased.

They come back, over the white sea, in the mist, Invisible, trooping home, the unassuaged ghosts Endlessly returning on the uneasy sea.

What do they want, the ghosts, what is it They demand as they stand in menace over against us? How shall we now appease whom we have raised up?

Must we open the doors, and admit them, receive them home, And in the silence, reverently, welcome them, And give them place and honour and service meet?

For one year’s space, attend on our angry dead, Soothe them with service and honour, and silence meet, Strengthen, prepare them for the journey hence, Then lead them to the gates of the unknown, And bid farewell, oh stately travellers, And wait till they are lost upon our sight.

There is another poem of Lawrence’s called _Perfidy_ that gives an elusive sense of horror and calamity. This effect lies partially in the five-line stanza formation with the first, third, and fourth lines rhyming. There is no particular reason for calling this poem Imagism either; but we have agreed by now, I trust, that is not our first consideration. No less a person than Miss Lowell herself gives us justification in this viewpoint, for in a review of the poems of Aldington and Flint in the June _Poetry Review_ she says, “Let us take these little volumes as poetry pure and simple, forgetting schools and creeds.”

There are thirty-two poems in all in the book. One person will like this one best, another that. Suffice that the book is a valuable contribution to contemporary literature.

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[1] _Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin._

Three Imagist Poets

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

(_Continued from the May issue_)

III

To pass from the poetry of Mr. Aldington to the poetry of H. D. is to pass into another world. For H. D. not only is a modern poet, she is in the best sense of the word a primitive poet. She deals with Greek themes in the same way as the Greeks of the seventh century B. C. might have dealt with them. She is not like Mr. Aldington, a sceptic enamoured of their lost beauty. In a sense she is indifferent to beauty. Something speaks to her in every rock, wave, or pine tree of those sunlit landscapes in which she seems to live. For her the decadence of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern world seem never to have existed. She is purely and frankly pagan.

How is it that so many people interested in Imagism seem never to have grasped this essential distinction between her work and Mr. Aldington’s? I must suppose it is because very few people have ever tried to analyze and rank the Imagist poets on any other basis than that of form. But as I have already pointed out, the form of the Imagists is, after all, a matter of lesser importance than the spirit, with which they approach that form. Aldington writes about life: H. D. is almost completely a nature poet. Nature to her is not mere inanimate scenery or beautiful decoration: it is packed with a life and significance which is beyond our individual lives, and all her poems are in a sense acts of worship towards it. Civilization for her does not exist, in our modern sense: she seeks a civilization based only on the complete realization of natural and physical law, without any ethical problems except the need of merging and compounding all one’s desires and emotions in that law. Her poetry is like a series of hymns of some forgotten and primitive religion.

I like to think that this primitive quality in H. D.’s poetry comes from the fact that she is an American. There can be no doubt that we are an uncultivated, a barbarous people. Our ancestors, by migrating to an immense and utterly undeveloped continent, without traditions, were thrown face to face with nature and lost, in consequence, nearly all feeling for their previous culture. If you take a child of civilized parents and bring him up among savages, he will revert to savagery, and in the same way our forefathers, as soon as they ceased to cling to the Atlantic seaboard, changed, through contact with the immense wilderness of the interior, not only mentally but physically. For example, Washington was physically and mentally an English squire of his period: Lincoln, about a hundred years later, was, in appearance and habits of thought, like a man of another race. The Indian, although conquered, gave to his conquerors the Indian way of thinking; or rather the Indian’s surroundings—the endless forest—produced in the newcomers’ minds something of the same way of thinking as the Indian had before their coming. What a pity it has been for art that we, as a nation, did not admit without shame this return to nature! But instead, we were ashamed of our barbarism, and we have striven and are still striving to outdo Europe on its own grounds, with the result that so much of our art seems merely transplanted, exotic, and false. We might have been the Russians of the western hemisphere; instead of that we were almost the provincial English. Instead of Fenimore Cooper and _The Song of Hiawatha_, we might have given to the world a new national epic. But the opportunity is now lost and whatever fragments of that epic may be written will have to be very sophisticated and in a sense artificial products.

To make an end of this long digression, I can truly say that I find nothing transplanted in H. D.’s poetry. She has borrowed a few names of gods from the early Greek, but that was because she found herself in complete sympathy with this people, who, if we are to believe the modern school of archaeology, were quite as barbarian themselves in the Homeric period as the Red Indians, and who lived in the closest contact with nature. Let us take an early example:

Hermes of the Ways

The hard sand breaks, And the grains of it Are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it, The wind, Playing on the wide shore, Piles little ridges, And the great waves Break over it.

But more than the many-foamed ways Of the sea, I know him Of the triple path-ways, Hermes, Who awaiteth.

Dubious, Facing three ways, Welcoming wayfarers, He whom the sea-orchard Shelters from the west, From the east, Weathers sea-wind: Fronts the great dunes.

Wind rushes Over the dunes, And the coarse salt-crusted grass Answers.

Heu, It whips round my ankles!

This is only one-half of the poem, but it will serve to show this poet’s method. Here Hermes is identified with the yellow barrier of sand dunes which breaks the wind, and splits it into three directions, as it comes in from the sea. The scenery and the feeling are not Greek. In fact, as someone has pointed out, the whole poem might have been called “The Coast of New Jersey.” But just as Coleridge found a way to give a feeling of the emptiness of the sea by narrating the tale of a legendary voyage on it, so H. D. has given us the eternal quality of the New Jersey coast by identifying its savagery with Greek myth.

The difference between H. D.’s poetry and Aldington’s is therefore a difference between an apparent complexity which cannot be analysed, since it is really the simplest synthesis of primitive feeling, and a studied simplicity which on analysis, reveals itself as something very complex and modern. Aldington’s work when studied carefully, raises questions about our life: H. D. goes deeper and offers us an eternal answer. With the single exception of the _Choricos_, I know of no work of H. D.’s which is not superior to Aldington’s in rhythm, as I know of no work of Aldington’s which does not seem to have more unsolved problems underlying its thought. Aldington is monodic, H. D. is strophaic: Aldington writes on many themes: H. D. on two or three: H. D.’s art is more perfect within its limits; Aldington’s is more interesting because of its very human imperfection.

There is another short thing of H. D.’s which fulfils perfectly the Greek dictum that a picture is a silent poem, a poem a speaking picture:

Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines, over our rocks. Hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.

A chorus of Oreads might very well have sung that to the wind. Over and over again, H. D. never tires of giving us the sea, the rocks, the pines, the sunlight. There is such a hard brightness of sunlight in some of the poems that it makes us fairly dizzy with its intensity:

O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it sideways.

Fruit cannot drop through this thick air: fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat, plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.

These poems are like cries to unknown gods. Some are simply stark in their dramatic magnificence:

The Wind Sleepers

Whiter than the crust left by the tide, we are stung by the hurled sand and the broken shells. We no longer sleep, sleep in the wind, we awoke and fled through the Peiraeic gate.

Tear, tear us an altar, tug at the cliff-boulders, pile them with the rough stones. We no longer sleep in the wind. Propitiate us.

Chant in a wail that never halts; pace a circle and pay tribute with a song.

When the roar of a dropped wave breaks into it, pour meted words of sea-hawks and gulls and sea-birds that cry discords.

Recently H. D. has been giving us longer and more complex poems—condensed dramas of nature and life. Her style has become broader and deeper, and her thought more weighty. I wish I could quote all of a poem of this nature called _Sea-Gods_. I can only give a brief analysis of it.

The entire poem is a sort of invocation and service of propitiation to the powers of the sea. In its opening lines the poet cries out:

They say there is no hope— sand—drift—rocks—rubble of the sea, the broken hulk of a ship, hung with shreds of rope, pallid under the cracked pitch.

They say there is no hope to conjure you.

In short, the gods are merely broken wrecks of the past. The forces of nature cannot help us, it is useless to cry out to them, for they are