POETS AND POETRY,

THE DANIEL JAZZ.*

"ABANDON starch all ye who enter here" ought to be the motto for Mr. Vachel Lindsay's new book of poems. It is sometimes a little difficult for us in England to do this ; we are perhaps a little obsessed by our view of the dignity of literature, and those of us who read a great deal of poetry have more often than not forgotten Bacchus and Dionysus and our childhood. For though the reading of Mr. Vachel Lindsay's poems may make us feel a little scared and a little prim, we must remember that, before advancing years had made us shy, there was a time, when in the right mood, we should have revelled in them—over the fire of an evening, or dabbling bare feet in a rock pool at the seaside on some afternoon when sea and sky glittered and danced. Then their high spirits, their enthusiasm, their "guts and glow," would have intoxicated us as they are meant to. We must remember that Mr. Vachel Lindsay is a poet who speaks to our moods of freedom, when we are away from hostile criticism, when, most of all, we are away from the odious spoil- sport who lives within us all, and whose acid "You are making a fool of yourself" has made drab the lives of some of us for good and all. Those who have had the good fortune to hear Mr. Vachel Lindsay recite "The Congo" will realize how much for its proper enjoyment it demanded a certain abandon, an "out of school" feeling, which for the self-conscious is only obtained in solitude or in carefully chosen society :— " Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, Boom,

With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,

Boomla.y, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.

THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.

I could not turn from their revel in derision.

THEN I SAW TILE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

Then along that riverbank A thousand miles Tattooed cannibals danced in files ; Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song

And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong' There was no doubt that if the listener accepted Mr. Vachel Lindsay's mood, his sense of the grotesque and of the uncanny, there was something extraordinarily stirring and impressive about this passage as he rendered it. "The Congo" really is "a roaring, epic, rag-time tune." The opening lines of the poem which we have just quoted are followed by an enlarg°. meat of the uncanny motif :— " Death is an Elephant,

Torch-eyed and horrible, Foam-flanked and terrible."

Death is the servant of Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo. we are confronted with the negroes, in wild, childish high spirit2* an implacable Mumbo-Jumbo, God of secret and bloody rites, ghost god. Then the mood of the poem changes, and in a moment A "Negro Fairyland" swings into view, where an ebony palace is guarded by a baboon butler, and the cake-walk princes laugh down the witch men who have threatened them with the dark terror of Mumbo-Jumbo :— " Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes, Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine,

And tall silk hats that were red as wine.

• The Dame/ Jaw. By Vachol Lindsay. London : G. Bell and bOw; [48. ed. net.]

And they pranced with their butterfly partners there, Coal-black maidens with pearls in their Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet, And bells on their ankles and little black-feet."

They walk for a cake that was tall as a man, defiant of the witch men who finally are unable to resist the laughter and nonsense. But there is another side of the negro character. As a revivalist he can outdo Moody, Sankey, and General Booth. The old preacher

"Beat on the Bible till he wore it out Starting the jubilee revival shout."

All along the valley of the Congo sweeps the cleansing fire of Christianity, sweeping over "the vine-snared trees," and the triumphant shout goes:—

" atumbe-Jumbo will die in the jungle ; Never again will he boo-don you, Never again will he hoe-duo you."

"Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men, And only the vulture dared again By the far, lone mountains of the moon

To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-don you.

Mambo . . . Jumbo . . . will . . . hoo-doo . . . you.'"

When Mr. Vachel Lindsay repeats this poem himself it has a swing, a pageantry, and a glamour which are remarkable.

In the collected poem; stage directions are printed in the margin, but we think Mr. Lindsay should perhaps have ex- plained his theory of recitation a little more, as, though to those who know his theories, or rather as he prefers to call them, his habits, hit intention in the stage directions is clear enough, they will not prove quite sufficiently informing to those who have not heard him speak. Briefly, we believe his theory is as follows. He thinks that poetry has lost a good deal by being written chiefly for the eye. On the other hand, he does not want to go back to the setting of poems to music, as he considers that at the present day music, even that written for the voice, has become so mathematical with its scales, tones, and semi-tones, that it is too elaborate to be used merely to enhance the effect of the written word. There is another music of a much more primitive kind which is much more to his purpose—that is, the music of the alphabet. A good French or English actor, for instance M. Coquelin or Mr. Henry Maley, creates for any individual piece of blank verse or Alexandrine that he may be rendering a beautiful pattern of sound, something which is almost a tune ; something which it would be a pleasure for a foreigner to listen to if he could not understand the words which are spoken. This is the music which Mr. Lindsay seeks todcvelop, and it is with the accompaniment of a fairly elaborate voice pattern that his verso must be judged. The reader may object that it is no new thing to say that verse should be read aloud ; this, of course, is perfectly true, but actually in practice Mr. Lindsay's writing,and delivery seem to carry the process of good dramatic diction a little further. For instance, in each poem there are passages almost purely rhetorical, written in order that the speaker of them, the pattern-maker, may be able to convey a sense of, say, tranquillity or, on the other hand, of swift motion. In "The Santa-Fe Trail" the poet gives us a picture of a day spent under the arched sky of the wide Kansas Plain ; he desires to give the reader a sense of the racing motors-

" Butting through the delicate mists of the morning, It comes like lightning, goos past roaring "-

of the cars which stream all day out of the East towards the brown sea-sands of the Pacific coat :— " Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn, Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn. Its for Kansas, land that restores us When houses choke us, and great books bore us I Sunries Kansas, harvester's Kansal, A million Mill have found you before us."

The first lines of this are, of course, simply syllables which, when properly rendered, will give a sense of swiftness and hurry. In the place they are surprisingly effective and graphic.

It is very interesting to notice the effect of Mr. Lindsay's Poem; on the poetically unsophisticated. They prove to be a sheer delight to the perfectly natural person or to the child. The mixture of humour, nonsense, and rhetoric, the high spirits, the go of them, act like wine when the listener is entirely unself- conscious and unprejudiced. It is, after all, for the unself- conscious and the unprejudiced that they are intended. Perhaps 31r. Vachel Lindsay is one of the first people to do really good aesthetic work which is intended for "natural man." It is not here a question of "writing down," of words in one syllable, it is the question of appealing, as does Edward Lear's nonsense, to our simplest aesthetic tastes—the tastes which all of us share, but which have hitherto generally been appealed to so badly and so shabbily, that even the simple have been rather ashamed to acknowledge them and the sophisticated have sup- pressed them altogether as unworthy. It was not the tastes that were unworthy, it was the stuff that was provided for their satisfaction. Nor is the question of this satisfaction an academia or even a literary one; it is one which probably has more to do with human happiness than is as yet well understood.