There creeps into the words a tinge
of the raw and the grotesque. The poet has the look of a cowboy off the
stage, tanned with grease-paint. But again and again the secret creeps
back and some lovely emanation of poetry is added to it:
Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen,
purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.
Or this, called "Reconciliation":
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw
near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin.
The bonds of rhyme shackled him, deprived him of more than freedom. He is
like a wild bird that suddenly perceives the bars of its small cage
across the blue of the sky. And yet the finer his poems are, the nearer
they approach to definite rhythmical design.
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