POETS AND POETRY.

THE POMI'S OF HISTORY.*

SiNcE his visit to this country the British public is probably more familiar with the work of Mr. Vachel Lindsay than with that of any other American poet. Nor, in a fashion, is their greater awareness in his ease unjust, for of most of the other American poets we might echo Gilbert's rhyme :—

"For he might have been a Russian, A French, a Turk, a Prussian, Or an Italian."

That is to say, unlike Mr. Vachel Lindsay, they have the merits and demerits of cosmopolitanism.

An American correspondent has sent us four books of American poetry which are not published in this country ; a fifth, Miss Amy Lowell's Can Grandee Castle, has been printed here by one of the most enterprising of the publishers of poetry, Mr. Basil Blackwell, of Oxford. Can Grande's Castle is a very remark- able achievement. In an elaborate preface Miss Lowell explains the technical theory on which it is written. In substance, the book consists of a series of historical vignettes. The first is of Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson ; this includes impressions both of the revolution in Naples and of the battles of Aboukir Bay and Trafalgar. The second relates to the opening up of Western trade with Japan by Commodore Perry in the paddle- wheel steam frigate 'Mississippi,' of the United States Navy. The third, which she calls "Hedge Island," is a coaching episode, an impression of England during the Napoleonic wars and a "Going down with Victory" set piece. The fourth is the story of the Bronze Horses of St. Mark, from the time they stood on • Can Grande's Castle. By Amy Lowell. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [Os. not.] the Arch of Nero and watched the triumph of Titus to the day of their removal from the sphere of German bombs in 1916. This sounds a sufficiently scholarly, almost a priggish, programme, but the book is one of those pieces of work which are so -full of life and vitality that, like life itself, they can be regarded from almost any angle. Can Grande's Castle would be a capital book in which to cram for a history examination, or in which to study English prose rhythms and some of the more modern sorts of rhymed and blank over libre. It is also what we believe is technically called a study in group ethics. Probably, however, it will, at any rate at first perusal, be regarde I by the reader chiefly as an intoxicant, in this respect rivalling those most electric and sonorous pieces of literature the Dream Fugues of De Quincey, which indeed they very much resemble. "Plus ca change, plus c'est in mgme chose." Miss Lowell's new" poly- phonic prose," though her approach through verse rather than through prose and her modern point of view have stamped it with a difference, is yet own brother to the lyrical passages in The Opium Rater. We have specially in mind an account of the dream in which is the passage (we quote from memory) : "Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater issue was at stake, some mightier cause than ever before the Sword had pleaded or the Trumpet had proclaimed." Miss Lowell's work will bear the comparison, for though De Quincey is often her equal in inspiration, De Quincey had little but inspiration. The opium-eater had not energy left either for the sustained patterns or the metaphysics ef the American.

One of the best examples of her thought, as apart from her form, are her oblique descriptions—poetical because they are too fantastic ever to become sohoolmasterish, of the effects of the opening-up of the trade with Japan upon our own western oivilization. We guarantee that the passage makes capital good sense.

"The Commodore writes in his cabin. Writes an account of what he has done. The sands of centuries run fast, one slides, and another, each falling into a smother of dust. A locomotive in pay for a Whistler ; telegraph wires buying a revolution ; weights and measures and Audubon's birds in exchange for fear. Yellow monkey-men leaping out of Pandora's box, shaking the rocks of the Western coastline. Golden California bartering panic for prints. The dressing-gowns of a continent won at the cost of security. Artists and philosophers lost in the hour-glass sand pouring through an open Gate."

The reader must also be given a sample of her powers of description. Shall it be the account of the Carnival in decadent

Venice ?

"Masks and balls begun at midnight, Burning ever to midday."

Shall it be of the great "silver-white thunderheads" rising up over the rim of the sea off Aboukir Bay—Nelson going to fight the French ? Or shall it be the legionaries marching into Rome in the triumph of Titus It is impossible to choose, but the book opens at the Roman incident, and we accept the omen :—

"Morning in Rome ; and the whole city foams out to meet it, seething, simmering, surging, seeping. All between the Janiculum and the Palatine is undulating with people. Scarlet, violet, and purple togas pattern the mass of black and brown. . . What is that sound ? The marble city shivers to the treading of feet. Caesar's legions marching, foot—foot—hundreds, thousands of feet. They beat the ground, rounding each step double. Corn- ing—coming—cohort after cohort, with brazen trumpets mark- ing the time. One—two—one—two—lawel-crowned each one of you, cactus-fibred, harsh as sand grinding the rocks of a tree- less land, rough and salt as a Dead Sea wind, only the fallen are left behind. Blood-red plumes, jarring to the footfalls;' they have passed through the gate, they are in the walls of the mother city, of marble Rome. Their tunics are purple embroidered with gold, their armour clanks as they walk, the cold steel of their swords is chill in the sun, each is a hero, one by one, endless companies, the soldiers come. Back to Rome with a victor's spoils, with a victor's wreath on every head, and Judah broken is dead, dead! 'lo triumphs!' The shout knocks and breaks upon the spears of the legionaries. The God of the Jews is overborne, He has failed his people. . . Slowly they come, the symbols of a beaten religion.. the Golden Table for the Shew-Bread, the Silver Trumpets that sounded the Jubilee, the Seven-Branched Candlestick, the very Tables of the Law which Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Can Jupiter conquer these ? Slowly they pass, glinting in the sunlight, staring in the light of day, mocked and exhibited. Lord God of Hosts, fall upon these people, send your thunders upon them, hurl the lightnings of your wrath against this multitude, raze their marble city so that not one stone remain standing. But the sun shines unclouded, and the holy vessels pass onward through the Campus Martine! through the Circus Mminius, up the Via Sacra to the Capitol:1

Then the refrain of the whole poem is repeated, a refrain that

sounds though the din of the chariot-races of Constantinople; through the tinkling of the Carnival in Venice, through the tramp of Napoleon's armies of Italy.

" The bronze horses look into the brilliant sky, they trot slowly without moving, they advance slowly, one foot raised. There is always another step—one, and another. How many does not matter, so that each is taken."

The passage we have quoted is surely an extraordinary four de force, but it is a tour de force of which, in a hundred variations, Miss Lowell seems endlessly capable. The passages about Venice are as distinguished and appropriate as those which bring Rome before us :— " Beautiful, faded city. The saa wind has dimmed your Oriental extravagance to an iris of rose, and ambor, and lilac. . A tabernacle set in glass, an ivory ornament resting upon a table of polished steel. It is the surface of the sea, spangled, crinkled, engine-turned to whorls of blue and silver, ridged in waves of flower-green and gold."

Has the reader noticed the interesting effect of the rhymes in the long passage we have quoted ? Miss Lowell says in her preface that she is not yet satisfied that their printing as ordinary prose is satisfactory ; in this we entirely agree with her. The effect is extremely puzzling if an attempt is made to read the passages aloud, which is, of course, the proper way to appreciate this type of bravura work.

Miss Lowell is immensely to be congratulated upon a book which is not only in itself a very fine piece of writing, but which once more vindicates Clio's right to be numbered among the Muses.