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and I particularly liked a delicate little epigram called "The End of
Love," which seems to evade the abstractions of its imagery and thus
to redeem another kind of interest. But in general, I find Miss Raine's
book uninteresting.
In the Rose of Time,
Robert Fitzgerald's collected poetry of the
past twenty-five years, is a very fine book, and I liked best in it the
more ambitious poems, "First Movement," "Georgie," "Celestine," "In
the Glass," and the final piece, "History."
If
Mr. Fitzgerald's diction
owes any debt to Pound or to Stevens, both debts demand only a nod of
acknowledgment for having pointed out a direction rather than spe–
cific paths. Several dominant modes may be heard in the mature poems
in the book. The least successful one is a little folksy, and breaks out
in "The Imprisoned," "Cinema," and "Cobb Would Have Caught It";
then there is the satiric voice of "Winter Quarters," "Patruus," and some
of the other shorter pieces which come off much better, it seems to
me, than large portions of Pound's
Propertius.
But throughout the book
it is the elegiac mode that keeps getting better and better and better.
I should like to quote all of "History," but the closing section will have
to do to show the success of Mr. Fitzgerald's more relaxed and specula–
tive diction even when it is being oracular:
A man, this :man,
Bred among lakes and railway cars and smoke,
The salt of childhood on his wintry lips,
His full heart ebbing toward the new tide
Arriving, arriving in laughter and cries,
Down the chaotic dawn and eastern drift,
Would hail the unforeseen, and celebrate
On the great mountainside those sprites,
Tongues of delight, that may remember him–
The yet unborn, trembling in the same rooms,
Breakfasting before the same grey windows,
Lying, grieving again; yet all beyond him,
Who knew he lived in roug.h Jehovah's breath,
And burned, a quiet wick in a wild night,
Loving what he beheld and will behold.
The verse in Philip Booth's first book,
Letter from a Distant Land,
is, in general, carefully ground without being over-faceted; its disposi–
tion toward heavy speech-stress governing shorter lines than might
be
expected and arranged in tight stanzas serves his pastoral subjects well.
