The lake falls over the shore So do we ever cry, A soft, unmutinous crying, When we know ourselves each a princess The lapping of lake water Is like the weeping of women, That water the dreams of men. CLAY HILLS It is easy to mould the yielding clay. Under the facile hand. But forms of clay are lightly broken; They will lie shattered and forgotten in a dingy corner. Yet underneath the slipping clay Is rock ... I would rather work in stubborn rock All the years of my life, And make one strong thing And set it in a high, clean place, To recall the granite strength of my desire. OLD MAN When an old man walks with lowered head And eyes that do not seem to see, I wonder does he ponder on Or has he turned his gaze within, Frail bridges to Infinity. RESCUE Wind and wave and the swinging rope Were calling me last night; None to save and little hope, No inner light. Each snarling lash of the stormy sea One desperate splash-and no use to me Death reached out three crooked claws I wheeled about, and Life's gray jaws To sea I gazed, and then I turned Stricken toward the shore, Praying half-crazed to a moon that burned Above your door. And at your door, you discovered me; And at your heart, I sobbed. . . . ... And if there be more of eternity Let me be robbed. Let me be clipped of that heritage And burned for ages through; Freed and stripped of my fear and rage— But not of you. John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, January 3, 1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts) and Harvard (1903-7) and, after spending several years in Massachusetts, moved to England, where, except for brief visits to the United States, he has lived ever since. In 1913 Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which he has referred to as "his literary wild oats," five small collections of experimental and faintly interesting verse. In 1914, shortly after the publication of his Fire and Wine, one of the early quintet, Fletcher joined the Imagists. With H. D. and Amy Lowell he became one of the leaders of this interesting movement and his contributions were among the outstanding features of the three anthologies which furnish so illuminating a record of the æsthetics of the period. Coincident with the first appearance of Some Imagist Poets, Fletcher discarded his previous style and emerged as a decidedly less conservative and far more arresting poet with Irradiations-Sand and Spray (1915). This volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; imagination riots through it, even though it is sometimes a bloodless and bodiless imagination. It is crowded— even overcrowded—with shifting subtleties, a brilliant if haphazard series of improvisations. In the following book, Goblins and Pagodas (1916), Fletcher carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates him; the ambitious set of eleven "color symphonies" is an elaborate design in which the tone as well as the thought is summoned by color-associations, sometimes closely related, sometimes far-fetched. "It contains," says Conrad Aiken in his appreciative chapter on Fletcher in Scepticisms, "little of the emotion which relates to the daily life of men and women. . . . It is a sort of absolute poetry, a poetry of detached waver and brilliance, a beautiful flowering of language alone-a parthenogenesis, as if language were fertilized by itself rather than by thought or feeling. Remove the magic of phrase and sound and there is nothing left: no thread of continuity, no thought, no story, no emotion. But the magic of phrase and sound is powerful, and it takes one into a fantastic world." Meanwhile, Fletcher has been developing. After having appeared in the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths rather than surfaces. Beginning with his majestic "Lincoln," his work has had a closer relation to humanity. A moving mysticism speaks from The Tree of Life (1918); the more obviously native Granite and Breakers (1921) and the later uncollected poems have a simplicity which is as new to this poet as it is passionate. The recent poems, though less superficially arresting than the ones by which he is best known, reach depths which the preceding verses rarely attained. Although the unconscious too often dictates Fletcher's fantasies, a calm music dominates his newer poems, a grave and subdued lyricism moves and enriches them. Never a popular poet, Fletcher gains-and suffers-from his very originality. FROM "IRRADIATIONS" I Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds; Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street. Whirlpools of purple and gold, Winds from the mountains of cinnabar, Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and balancing Amid vermilion pavilions, against the jade balustrades, Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds; Flickering of incessant rain. On flashing pavements: Sudden scurry of umbrellas: II Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm. The winds come clanging and clattering From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits: They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom, And the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves. Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain III The trees, like great jade elephants, Chained, stamp and shake 'neath the gadflies of the breeze; The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants: The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies, The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shah. Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of those trees. IV O seeded grass, you army of little men Crawling up the long slope with quivering, quick blades of steel: You who storm millions of graves, tiny green tentacles of Earth, Interlace yourselves tightly over my heart, And do not let me go: For I would lie here forever and watch with one eye The pilgrimaging ants in your dull, savage jungles, The while with the other I see the stiff lines of the slope Break in mid-air, a wave surprisingly arrested, And above them, wavering, dancing, bodiless, colorless, unreal, The long thin lazy fingers of the heat. V The morning is clean and blue and the wind blows up the clouds: Now my thoughts gathered from afar |