Poems

&uag-Hole
By WHITTAKERCHAMBERS
He waited and, as he
waited, grew less eager.
He had come first, believing he was anxious.
The quag lay buried in the darkness at his feet.
The village lights shone f a r between and meager.
Me mustnotwhistlehere.Hisnervesgrewtauter.
A wind, that rose among the woods behind him,
Diedthroughthe
fields. Then silence-broken
By turtles puddling the inviskble bogwater.

only

Then, through astillness,listening,

he heard
Herrunning
on thepath, night-terrified
Or eager.Andhewatched
her body slacken
A n d look for him. She stopped. He never stirred.
~

But saw how credulously, hour by hour,she stood.

And when, at last, the longing woman went,
He set his face t o make the nearest light,
And marched to beat the silence through the

Carib Canoe Under Sail

By GRACE H M A R D CONKLING
Beyond the peacock furrow plowed by the sun,
Where the foam-ridges break and feather to green,
Let the canoe be sharp on aquamarine
With twin sails of split silver. Let her run
Shrewdly along the sea as she has. done
So many centuries, supple and lean,
-4nd let those rakish moms of hers careen
And quiver, proud that she is the only one
To wear the wind.
.
Atnightfromtheshore
mist
Her moth-wings flutter as they might forsake
The jungle dusk to haunt the
harbor-mouth.
Out of its sleep the sea rouses t o twist
Lianas of great stars along her wake.
Creature of sea and jungle, she is the south.

Ballad
By CHARLES NORMAN
When Christ came down from Galilee
He wasmost plainly clad,
~Alrd villagesturned out t o see
The look he had.
Christ was a good man, preaching love,
And brotherhood, and pity:
And so on the hill that stood above
The towered city,
They nailed him on a cross with two
Who sinned in other fashion.
And splendidly he died, as do
Most men of passion.

GOOD deal has happened in the rather

small world
wherepoetry
is discussedsince
Matthew Arnocld,
endeavoring to say once and for all what poetry was, quoted
a passage from Pindar and remarked:
Suchpoetrykills
Drydens the moment it is put near it. We cannot be SO
sure any more that poetry is a single definable thing, and
certainly we havelearned that one good kindneverkills
another.Remembering
Arnolds condescension to Dryden,
whom he granted a place only among writers of prose and
apostles of reason, I derive rich satisfaction from the title
ofT.
S. Eliotsnew ventureintocriticism,
Homage to
John Dryden(London;TheHogarthPress:
3/61. Not
only is Mr. Eliot one of the most considerable of contemporary poets ; he comes very- near to being the clearest and
subtlest of contemporarycritics.
Inanearlier
volume,
The Sacred Wood, he was somewhat tantalizing through
a failure to draw his excellent doctrines into line one with
another and so shape a creed, and here also he is content to
analyze rather than to legislate. To note this is to acknowledge his intelligence-which
neverflags ; yet one cannot
help suspecting that a greater degree of explicitness would
have produced a profounder
effect. However that may be,
Mr. Eliothasperfectly
defined Dryden, andindoing
so
he has justified him.
Mr. Eliots preferenceslargely proceed from the dissatisfaction which hefeelswiththepoetry
of the nineteenthandtwentiethcenturies.
To enjoyDryden,
he
says, is to pass . . . into a new freedom. For Drydenand this would have seemed a paradox to Arnold-is one
of the most purely poetical of all writers, possessing a s he
does the power to charge any material, even the most unlikely, with music and to render small things great through
the vitality of his touch. It is this touch which Mr. Eliot
hasset himself to define. Thedetails of his exposition
cannot be gone into, thoughit should be-remarked that as he
advanceshe does notshirkthetask
of disengaging the
precisequality
of Drydens wit. He lacked insight,he
lacked profundity,
Mr.
Eliot
concludes. But
where
Drydenfailstosatisfy,thenineteenthcentury
does not
satisfy us either; andwhere that centuryhas condemned
him, it is itself condemned. In the next revolution of taste
it is possible that poets may turn -to the study of Dryden.
Heremains
one of those who have setstandardsfor
English verse which i t is desperate to ignore.
Some notion of the kind of poetry which does not fail
to satisfy Mr. Eliot may be gained from the
two essays
which follow in this booklet. The essay on Andrew Marvel1
is the happiest that we have, and in the essay on the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century &Tr. Eliot states
moreclearly than ever beforenot only what helikes but
what he himself is. He finds Donne and Herbert and Marvel! and Cowley standing in the main current
of English
poetry by virtue of the fact that they possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. . When a poets mind is perfectly equipped for its
work, i t i s constantly amalgamating disparate experience;
theordinary mans experience is chaotic, irregular,fragmentary.The
latterfallsin
love,
reads Spinoza, and
these two experiences have nothing t o do with each other,

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