THE POETIC YEAR FOR 1916 I MAGIC CASEMENTS HAVE you been drunk with April weather? Then you know what it is to be rapturously intoxicated with the charming experience of listening to Psyche quoting from Bliss Carman's "April Airs": April now in morning clad With the south wind in her voice, With the sunlight on her brow, Through her veil of silver showers, April o'er New England now Trails her robe of woodland flowers, Violet and anemone; While along the misty sea, Pipe at lip, she seems to blow Haunting airs of long ago. It was an inspiration for me, beyond the mere experience, because it brought to birth a resolution which became a joyous fact. 1 It was a happy accident that discovered and won for me the hospitality of Laurel Farm, resting there in the North with its western acres running down to the Merrimac River. It spreads eastward from the house by the high road, to the wooded hills covering eight or ten miles, to euphonious Derry with its famous academy and associations of our New England Theocritus, Robert Frost, nestling in the New Hampshire landscape. We entered the woods by the Derry Road, the only highway crossing eastward from the trolley line which runs from Nashua to Manchester, and on either side of this ascending and twisting pathway were thick woods of hemlocks, birches, poplars and pines, shading running streams and silent sombre pools. This main road, now lifting, then lying flat for a distance on the crest of a rise, and sometimes like an open current of brown sand bordered for stretches by low fields of bushes and innumerable varieties of wild flowers, ran in freakish windings to Derry. All along the way sidepaths, which are sometimes scarcely more than secret footways, and at others the width of wheelruts over which lumbermen and farmers take short cuts, go twisting north and south, sloping and turning into the heart of the woods. Under the thick and tangled boughs of the trees the ground is rich with nature's carpeting of every design of moss and fern; the open spaces, naturally so, or due to the cutting of timber, or forest fires, are filled with every variety of wild flowers, and the thick, tangled, swampy hollows massed with moun A short distance tain laurel. A short distance up the Derry Road from the car line, is the neglected cemetery, on the crest of a hill, completely encircled by the woods. Just beyond the cemetery, where the ground is level for a stretch, a branch road turns southeast from the main highway through the woods; the latter widens at this point, and on the left is a considerable clearing where the forest fire of last year bequeathed its heritage of charred tree trunks, standing desolate and ghostly against the shimmering and luxuriant colors of the woods. beyond. On the south side of the road, a quarter of a mile behind the cemetery, is a pine grove, and in our fancy, the fancy, I should say,- of Psyche who suggested it, we had a fairy belief that some New England Academus had set it there for our discussion of poetry. There were four of us in the little group, and our common love for the art of poetry suggested a weekly meeting in the grove to discuss the books we had all agreed upon reading. "It is a good way,” I remarked, “to examine the poetry of the year from different points of view, resulting in a sort of collective judgment. Out of the flood of books that pour from the press, we will select sixty or seventy volumes as representative. We will take a certain number a week: it might be two, three, four, five or six. I will see that copies of the books are distributed around not less than one week ahead of our meeting; sometimes two or three weeks will intervene for careful study." I |