POETS AND POETRY.

BUCOLIC POETRY.*

THIS volume consists of a selection from Mr. Robert Frost's three books Mountain Interval, North of Boston and A Boy's Will. It contains some of his best poems and represents very satisfactorily his work as a whole. That work is highly original and its peculiar and elusive quality is very difficult to define. Much of it, like that of Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr. W. W. Gibson in England, is the poetry of common life and its language the simple straightforward New England speech ; yet it is only necessary to read it as plain prose to discover its essentially poetic quality, for these poems have a rhythmical structure which is not imposed on them perforce but is bone of their bone. They are, in the good sense, rhetorical—made to be spoken—and, properly spoken, they shape themselves into undeniable poetry.

But rhythm alone will not make a poem, nor will ideas alone, for an idea is not in itself either poetical or unpoetical. It is the writer's expression of his idea which gives it its quality, and Mr. Frost's ideas—even his apparently most ordinary and workaday ideas—are those of a poet and not of a scientist or philosopher. They are conceived as emotion and therefore, when expressed, they are poetry. But to emphasize the plainness and simplicity of his language as one of his most characteristic qualities is not, as might be assumed, to imply a corresponding mental and emotional plainness and lack of subtlety. On the contrary, his preceptions are unusually delicate both when directed towards nature and towards human psychology, and he is, besides, despite his apparent artlessness, a very careful artist. He knows well enough how to produce the right stimulus at the right moment, as when in " The Death of the Hired Man," after the long, plain dialogue in the dark porch between the man and woman, he abruptly changes the key :— " Part of a moon was falling down the west

Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills " : and suddenly, with that vivid and impressive picture, lifts the whole poem on to a higher plane. Those lines produce a

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strong visual impression, and in all his work a sharp appre- ciation of visual essentials is evident. The timid, excited colt described in " The Rhnaway " remains in the memory as a thing seen rather than read of, and the ending of the poem, with the flat commonplace of its immediate effect and its subtle emotional implication as a part of the whole, is typical :—

" Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,

When other creatures have gone to stall and bin, Ought to be told to come and take him in." In Mr. Frost's poetry we meet not a visionary or a dreamer but a mellow creature of the countryside. The things about him, the things of his actual experience—truth and fact— have, for him, poetry enough to absorb all his attention. This attitude towards poetry is implied in the poem called " Mowing "

:-

"There was never a sound beside the wood but one, - And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered ? I knew not well myself ; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf :

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchiscs), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make."

No account of Mr. Frost's poetry would be complete without a reference to his lyrics, in which, though never merely decora- tive or precious, he is in the conventional and superficial sense more poetical. A few of those lyrics are, in my opinion, quite flawless—a permanent contribution to the lyric poetry of our language, and considering his work as a whole I can think of no poet of his generation who seems to me more worthy to