discretion," Psyche replied with diffidence; "for I have really become romantic in this modern age, and purchased a "knight.'" "A stern and bold one, I trust! was my surprised exclamation at her apology for neglecting poetry. Cassandra was too confounded for utterance; while Jason wore a smile of approval. "Well, it is one, anyway, that can take me and you, too, my friends, if you will accept my hospitality over Mr. Clapp's 'Overland' route." And taking some sheets of paper from her bag, she began quoting as we walked along to the grove, this poem: "Out of the desolation and the emptiness, the vast flat, gaunt green land, out of the pale, primeval, blue sky and the sweet sun, the horizon's gold and silver bastioned, purple-piled cloud mountain ranges of thunder storms that bring thin rains at night,speak, O thou mute and mighty earth-transfusing spirit, speak and break the spell of the phantasmal, hurtling, inert, smiling day. Voice of the dull-brown haycocks, listless windmills, the barren, squat, meek, lonely little houses, the glittering, restless, wind-streaked chrysoprase of corn, stark dearth of red earth miles on miles, gigantic palisaded rock-ruins crumbling by dry rivers, thistles, daisies, lank fences stalking out against the sky threading the waste, voice of the soul of this treeless land where never the feet of men were set till yesterday, speak while the train rolls making rhythms, rattling, roaring, clicking, crashing, caught out of the emptiness, rhythms of space, sledgeriveted fast and faster into my spirit, till my spirit makes its wings of them, nay more, bid thou God's self speak, as from west to eastern sea wheels whirl me, hurl me, hissing, jarring, being bound beyond the sea Let Him look out with me, with me remember what else were but a hopeless cirque of changes, the blank stupendous ages of the making,— winter, spring, the fierce, still summer, autumn when gigantic winds hurled down His heavens on His earth,— snow, the endless, soothing, saving, silent white ness, as æon into less bleak æon crept. O world divine! add thou this to thy story, this remember, how I caught up upon this beating iron thing, saw clear as God sees, in one moment seized in my life His life, how I, who foresaw seeing all with Him, am all this vast land's dull unaging change, the gor geous harvest, and all the blue, pale sky, the fields, the houses, hills, I who am my love who sits across the ocean! O to be for her sake, being her, creation's self and God's self, heart that feels it all and hand that makes and moves continent and ocean, earth and heavens, as grinding still, still breathless, ponderous, arrowlike, relentless, hour on hour we roar. The bare land twists and twists and falls behind, the cross-treed poles jump up, and flickering drift to dots across the world's edge – nothing the eager wires, sagging, heaving on, pierce the thin air with windless murmurings far flashing light-swift thoughts from sea to sea. But thou, more strong to grip life vast and whole, greenly to grasp the great world like spring grass, bluely to hold it mine like sun-blue seas, ... to see beyond man, nature, fathoming God,— be quicker than thy dreams, O soul of mine speed, speed, thou more than God, thou throbbing, whistling pulse of all things, life, love ... and, O to be with you, my love, to be with you! Desire makes all our fiery, shouting speed, stagna tion, makes as the dead past nations yet to spring here throned in the pregnant waste grown radiant, and less than figments of a dying dream the non-builded earth, the building God who knows no more than day and night, blue sky, green earth, who blindly makes and passes, groping with mighty hands that shaping feel ever from nothing into nothingness I, O my all-embracing soul, my life's God-con quering, God-creating soul-vibration, I listen, care what has been, what will yet be, love, being you, who fly to you?" "It will take a pretty good car to follow Mr. Clapp's Overland' route," Cassandra suggested. "If the Overland roads are as irregular as his verse, there'll be difficult travelling, indeed.” 66 "I don't know what Mr. Clapp's purpose may be," Jason added his opinion, "but to the eye he seems one of the free-formers, and to the ear a conventional metrist. He doesn't begin each line, but each stanza - which may be twenty-one lines, as in the opening poem of his volume, 'On the Overland,' with a capital letter. Yet the lines may be of arbitrary length, without rhyme, or of regular metre and rhyme. Even so strict a form as a sonnet may be a one-sentenced affair with this poet." "Mr. Clapp is a little startlingly neither fish nor fowl, it seems, in the matter of form," I joined in. "But there is something grim and resistless about his substance. He is what I call a poet of heavy encounters with life. He sings of the 'unutterable strength of sky and sea,' and of a 'tide-eaten crag in obdurate agonies,' that'reabsorbs its foam of frantic hands!' His imagination is true, but ungovernable at times—like one's appetite rather than one's temper." "Whatever it is like," Psyche exclaimed with conviction, "it is unlike any expression I could accept, to speak of feeling a stealthy sickness in these flowers.' The line occurs in a poem called 'Mist,' which shows, I believe, Mr. Clapp has a sympathy maybe unconscious with the traditions of the eighteen-nineties in English poetry." 6 "He's just a good masculine poet, with a clearseeing eye, and little bother about illusions," commented Cassandra. "I am going to read this poem Cleared,' which is a good corrective against the sentimentalizing of reality. You don't know just what it is, but something stands naked in the lines. It is the spirit of nature declaring itself in the elements. Here it is," and she read: "Exquisite indwelling cry of rain out on these white and marching infinite The unwitherable strength of sky and sea and reabsorbs its foam of frantic hands. |