Instigations Part 34

This cold sardonic statement is definitely of the school of Theophile Gautier; as definitely as Eliot's "Conversation Galante" is in the manner of Jules Laforgue. There is a great deal in the rest of Mr.

Eliot's poetry which is personal, and in no wise derivative either from the French or from Webster and Tourneur; just as there is in "The Hippopotamus" a great deal which is not Theophile Gautier. I quote the two present poems simply to emphasize a certain lineage and certain French virtues and qualities, which are, to put it most mildly, a great and blessed relief after the official dullness and Wordsworthian lignification of the "Georgian" Anthologies and their descendants and derivatives as upheld by _The New Statesman_, that nadir of the planet of hebetude, that apogee of the kulturesque.

CONVERSATION GALANTE[8]

I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon!

Or possibly (fantastic, I confess) It may be Prester John's balloon Or an old battered lantern hung aloft To light poor travelers to their distress."

She then: "How you digress!"

And I then: "Some one frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine, music which we seize To body forth our own vacuity."

She then: "Does this refer to me?"

"Oh no, it is I who am inane."

"You, madam, are the eternal humorist, The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!

With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute:--"

And--: "Are we then so serious?"

Laforgue's influence or Ghil's or some kindred tendency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne Moore, and of Mina Loy. A verbalism less finished than Eliot's appears in Miss Moore's verses called--

PEDANTIC LITERALIST

Prince Rupert's drop, paper muslin ghost, White torch "with power to say unkind Things with kindness and the most Irritating things in the midst of love and Tears," you invite destruction.

You are like the meditative man With the perfunctory heart; its Carved cordiality ran To and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal Immutable production;

Then afterward "neglected to be Painful" and "deluded him with Loitering formality, Doing its duty as if it did not,"

Presenting an obstruction

To the motive that it served. What stood Erect in you has withered. A Little "palmtree of turned wood"

Informs your once spontaneous core in its Immutable reduction.

The reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations of Keats, diaphanous dilutations of Sh.e.l.ley, woolly Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swish ful Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's departures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that highly elastic term. The Palgravian will then with disappointment discover that his favorite and conventional whine is inapplicable. Miss Moore "rhymes in places." Her versification does not fit in with preconceived notions of _vers libre_.

It possesses a strophic structure. The elderly Newboltian groans. The all-wool unbleached Georgian sighs ominously. Another author has been reading French poets, and using words for the communication of thought.

Alas, times will not stay anch.o.r.ed.

Mina Loy has been equally subject to something like international influence; there are lines in her "Ineffectual Marriage" perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore, as, for example:--

"So here we might dispense with her Gina being a female But she was more than that Being an incipience a correlative an instigation to the reaction of man From the palpable to the transcendent Mollescent irritant of his fantasy

Gina had her use Being useful contentedly conscious She flowered in Empyrean From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays a warm light in the parlor From the gritty road on the white wall anybody could see it Shimmered a composite effigy Madonna crinolined a man hidden beneath her hoop.

Patience said Gina is an attribute And she learned at any hour to offer The dish appropriately delectable

What had Miovanni made of his ego In his library What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans One never asked the other."

These lines are not written as Henry Davray said recently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Georgian Anthology" poems are written, _i.e._, in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder a leur vocabulaire." Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set down to convey a definite meaning, and words accommodated to that meaning, even if they do not copy the mannerisms of the five or six by no means impeccable nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry Society has decided to imitate.

All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, according to the taste of the reader; according to his freedom from, or his bondage to, custom.

Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsicalities of these ladies, are the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities and mental quirks of Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be said for, some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but for all his roughness there remains with me the conviction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "Al que quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we found it in his earlier poems. "The Tempers" (published by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coroner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Imagistes"; but there is beyond these qualities the absolute conviction of a man with his feet on the soil, on a soil personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He is at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never without sap in abundance. His course may be well indicated by the change of the last few years; we found him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maximum of subjective reality:

POSTLUDE

Now that I have cooled to you Let there be gold of tarnished masonry, Temples soothed by the sun to ruin That sleep utterly.

Give me hand for the dances, Ripples at Philae, in and out, And lips, my Lesbian, Wall flowers that once were flame.

Your hair is my Carthage And my arms the bow, And our words the arrows To shoot the stars, Who from that misty sea Swarm to destroy us.

But you there beside me--- Oh! how shall I defy you, Who wound me in the night With b.r.e.a.s.t.s shining like Venus and like Mars?

The night that is shouting Jason When the loud eaves rattle As with waves above me, Blue at the prow of my desire.

O prayers in the dark!

O incense to Poseidon!

Calm in Atlantis.

From this he has, as some would say, "turned" to a sort of maximum objective reality in

THE OLD MEN

Old men who have studied every leg show in the city Old men cut from touch by the perfumed music-- polished or fleeced skulls that stand before the whole theatre in silent att.i.tudes of attention,-- old men who have taken precedence over young men and even over dark-faced husbands whose minds are a street with arc-lights.

Solitary old men for whom we find no excuses....

This is less savage than "Les a.s.sis." His "Portrait of a Woman in Bed"

incites me to a comparison with Rimbaud's picture of an old actress in her "loge." Not to Rimbaud's disadvantage. I don't know that any, save the wholly initiated into the cult of anti-exoticism, would take Williams' poem for an exotic, but there is no accounting for what may occur in such cases.

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN IN BED

There's my things drying in the corner; that blue skirt joined to the gray shirt--

I'm sick of trouble!

Lift the covers if you want me and you'll see the rest of my clothes-- though it would be cold lying with nothing on!

I won't work and I've got no cash.

What are you going to do about it?

----and no jewelry (the crazy fools).

But I've my two eyes and a smooth face and here's this! look!

it's high!

There's brains and blood in there-- my name's Robitza!

Corsets can go to the devil-- and drawers along with them!

What do I care!