Thus, the master, reaching his own conclusion of helplessness so long as human hearts remain human, so long as might can force its way, so long as trade can exact its fare from the poor, turns piteously to love for the only solution of this greatest of all problems. Love must soften the souls of men, love must find his way into the market-place, must fix his abiding place in every part of the world, ere there will be a change. Until then men will live apart from nature, men will oppress the poor and traffic in souls-until then the old, old world will remain unchanged and no sign of a millenium appear on the sky. And until then,

"Ever Love hears the poor folks crying

And ever Love hears the women's sighing."

But taking heart, the master is stayed by Hope and, though acknowledging that the day has been long deferred, he ends this exquisite song of all songs with these prophetic lines:

"And yet shall Love himself be heard,

Though long deferred, though long deferred;
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word."

Recent Poetry by North Carolina Writers*

JULIUS W. PRATT

United States Naval Academy

If the North Carolina State Literary and Historical Association is to be congratulated upon the liberal spirit it has shown of late years in its willingness to honor adopted or temporary children of the State, it is to be congratulated even more this year upon the opportunity of awarding its principal prize the Patterson Cup-to so rare and beautiful a work as Mrs. Olive Tilford Dargan's The Cycle's Rim. But even as I write, I feel that my words perhaps call for apology, for certainly never poem gave surer proof than this of being brought from the Valley of the Shadow, and the welcome accorded it should hold as much of reverence as of joy.

I have spoken of this sequence of fifty-three sonnets as of one poem, and I do so intentionally. No sonnet sequence of my acquaintance surpasses this in unity of effect or in steady onward march from first to last. Admirably constructed individually, these sonnets blend even more admirably into a song of love and death and eventual triumph, a threnody which, in my opinion, deserves to take its place among our literature's great elegiac poems. To me it is particularly suggestive of one of the greatest of these. The spirit is the spirit of Shelley. Shorn of its mythology, given a woman's heart and a loss more personal and poignant than was Keats's to Shelley, and the "Adonais" would have been very like this twentieth century lament. Indeed, as I read it, there came to me again and again, as breathing its very spirit, those wonderful closing lines of Shelley's poem:

"The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

The plan of the poem is simple. The first few sonnets phrase the dedication to one, like "Adonais," lost at sea. Then,

*The Cycle's Rim. By Olive Tilford Dargan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.00 net.

Saber and Song: A Book of Poems. By William Thornton Whitsett. Whitsett, N. C.: Whitsett Institute. Cloth, $1.25; leather, $1.50.

in fancy, the stanzas trace the brief, ecstatic career of love amid exquisitely pictured scenes of mountain and wood and stream, the content with simple things under love's transfiguring power, the first despair of loss, and so through a blank world on to a new sense of communion with the beloved and a faith in his guidance to an expanding world of good. Particularly beautiful in both thought and expression are those sonnets in which the bereaved lover retraces the old loved paths and those where a sense of new communion with the departed appears, first as a beautiful fancy, then as belonging to that shadowy world that is more than fancy and less than fact.

In the technique of the sonnet, Mrs. Dargan leaves little to be desired. In such technical matters as the division between octave and sestet she allows herself much liberty, with the result that the sonnet in her hands is a living thing, not a stereotyped pattern. Her diction is at once simple and lofty; there is no apparent striving for effect, no yielding of sense or naturalness to the exigencies of the verse. The heart speaks, as simply and directly as did Mrs. Browning's. The many nature pictures show the eye of the keen and affectionate observer, and the figures are the work of a ready and sure imagination.

There is not a sonnet in the volume that could not be quoted to advantage. I have chosen for this purpose the first and the fiftieth.

I

Deep lies thy body, jewel of the sea,

Locked down with wave on wave. Pearl-drift among

The coral towers, and yet not thee, not thee!

So lightly didst thou mount, blue rung o'er rung,
The lustred ladder rippling from that land
Of strangely boughed and wooing wildernesses.
Province of dream unwaning, dream yet banned
From sleepers in the sun; but thou, as presses
The lark that feels his song, sped to thy sky,
O unrepressed! If thou wouldst choose be gone,
What sea-charm then could stay thee, bid thee lie
Too deep for cock-crow earth or heaven's dawn?
Yet must I chant these broken, mortal staves,
And lay my leaf of laurel on the waves.

L

How gently I would move by thee, and strive
To make my step as noiseless as thine own!
And we should find the old dreams still alive,
And not a dead leaf on our altars blown.
Ah, farther! To that ambered, orient sea
We never saw with mortal eyes awake,
Though in our sleep it rippled; glidingly
To all fair places carried like an ache

In our blind breasts; and sometime rest us by
Old temples carved as though the fingered Dawn
Religion were and wrought in ivory

Gifts for the God of Light; so fair the moon
Might here forget to pass, as we, O love!
Below in wonder, as the moon above.

Another interesting book of verse comes to us from one of North Carolina's native sons. Professor William Thornton Whitsett, long known among the State's prominent educators, has recently published his first collection of poems under the title Saber and Song.

The poems in this volume are for the most part of a reflective or philosophic nature, and, as is to be expected in such poems, they translate pretty accurately the author's personality. Apparent in them is his thorough scholarship, a scholarship touched with eager aesthetic perception. This quality is evident in the first and most ambitious poem in the collection, "An Ode to Expression," which sums up in dignified verse the spirit and significance of the several branches of art and closes with this interpretation of the artistic impulse, the universal longing for self-expression:

"God, let me voice myself before I die!

Whether my work be spurned, or whether good,
Know this, I glimpsed Thy Truth; I understood."

The power and importance of beautiful expression are again the theme in what to my mind is the most simple and symmetrical-perhaps the most generally pleasing-piece in the collection, the sonnet entitled "The Singer." I quote the last seven lines:

"But as men loved him, shall we say he failed?
No; for this world is fairer for his life,"
And Nature dearer, her he gave a voice

That found its echo in the heart of truth.
His song of beauty rose above the strife,

And though he fell, his comrades still rejoice,

For dream and song know neither age nor youth."

But the loftiest of all forms of expression, Mr. Whitsett thinks, is beautiful character, and to this subject—and the ideals and means which make it—are devoted many of his poems. The religious note, also, is prominent, though quite as much by implication as by direct dwelling thereupon. The volume is full of earnest religious feeling.

In the form of his poems Mr. Whitsett displays considerable facility in a variety of meters and stanzas, and, although he is more at home in the simple meters, he shows a good technical mastery of the rather difficult verse employed in "The Soul of the Sea."

Without venturing to find fault, it may not be amiss to point out certain traits in the volume which would seem to align the author with nineteenth rather than with twentieth century poetic ideals. Certain "poetic licenses" which modern practice inclines to frown upon, he employs frequently,-for example, a word order twisted to fit the verse, such "poetic" wording as "I wis," "bedight," "wold,” and “lethal,” and an occasional looseness in diction, particularly in the use of adjectives. As a result, perhaps, of this looseness-this lack of the exact and specific word-his poetry lacks the visual vividness so much sought after by the new schools of poetry. Finally, there is in some of the poems a bit more of moralizing, of didacticism, than present tastes, as defined by the critics, appear to relish. But critics are notoriously liable to error, and I feel safe in predicting that Mr. Whitsett's fine idealism and his often forceful, rhythmical verse will win his volume many sympathetic and admiring readers.

The book is admirably printed and bound. The first word. of the title is a bit misleading. One expects a war note which is never sounded.