Hand-Made Poetry
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
I HAVE lost fifteen pounds. This is lamentable, as I was already incredibly thin. My nature cries for expression of this elemental sorrow, — the sorrow felt at the loss of sinew and substance by one already sufficiently lean and spare. I search the poets for a sympathetic voicing of my thought, and I find that upon this one subject they are silent. Can I believe that they were all abundantly rotund? Or did they regard their fluctuations in weight merely as physiological phenomena? To me, the disappearance — not condensation, but absolute evanishment — of hoarded ounces represents a mystic problem. Just whither have they flown, those atoms of mine, which, by laws of conservation, must now be reassembling themselves in some form: as dew, or dust, or flame, or ash, or ghostly vapor? And shall I claim no property right? Shall I feel no yearning for chance tidings of how they fare? A fruitful thought, in sooth. And because no poet has tuned his lute for me, I must construct my poems by hand. Laborious, to be sure, but the easier for the careful following of masters.
Fancy an emaciated Browning poised upon his trusty scales, reading with stricken eyes the loss of so considerable an amount. How would he grasp his fiery pen and set himself in this wise to write: —
To make a hand. Nay, two the heft of mine.
What does a hand weigh? Fifteen honest pounds
Should make at least a head — a head, say, and a hand.
Think! Had I lost my head and my right hand
I’d weep to find them gone. Why then not grieve
At loss of valued flesh, equivalent weight,
Gone, — God knows where.
As usual, R. B. is exclamatory, fragmentary. But no definite solution of the puzzle offers, not even the visionary gleam of a surmise. I bethink me of the infinite range of possibilities, — the utter certainty that somewhere my atoms are abroad in the land. Is their secret hiding-place in the vague drifting of summer rain; or the throbbing red of the hawthorn blossoms; or the faint humming of whitened clover fields? It soothes me to reflect upon Swinburne’s mad revelry in extravagant detail; give him but his six-stressed line, and the ends of the world for his cæsura, and hear the sweeping echo of his fantasy:
Quivering there in the glow of the wind and the rose in the west,
Fragments that linger at last in the dream-haunted vapors that roll
Tranquil as incense that floats from the silver-swung censer of rest.
Oh, that I wholly were vanished, to follow the part that has gone —
Feeling the pulse of the light in the far-lying path of a star,
Fainting in fragrance of dusk as I steal down the shadows alone —
Dim-flying forms of the elves a-glimpse in the stillness afar.
But Swinburne, as usual, cannot be trusted to the finish. What assurance have I heard from any newsy herald that my atoms have solved themselves in evening mist and twilight fragrances? He is too remote, is Swinburne. As I ponder introspectively upon the tendency of such substance as remains to me, I find that its stirrings are mainly commonplace; that it thrills to a flower rather than to a fragrance, — at a touch more delicately than at a thought. And I cast about for a quiet singer who fain would forsake the Milky Way to haunt a garden path; who would rather dwell in a sea-pool with the gray barnacles and the companionable urchins, and the sensitive, frayed anemones, than upon the ragged crest of windy storm-clouds. Oh, for a dainty, lovesome triolet written by Austin Dobson’s gentle shade! How would he trim his lantern and dip his quill and order his rhyme-scheme! And how clumsily, in contrast, we rustle our way about his quaint Provençal garden close. Still — there is yet to be phrased the song of our own atoms, lately lost.
In the heart of the pansies?
Oh — I think that a few
Must have danced in the dew,
And that some of them flew
To make spice for the tansies,
Ere they danced in the dew
In the heart of the pansies!
And still my thought is a mere problem. Still there is no ultimate conviction as to the whereabouts of my errant self. I ponder the advisability of seeking more ripe and elderly sympathy from Chaucer. But I am sure that he would light his Chaucerean candle and proceed forthwith, not to enlighten me, but, shrewd eyes a-twinkle, diabolically to describe me! And just that I could not bear. ‘Lene as is a rake,’ — I find that I rather shrink from the cheerful Dan. And, besides, he is so traditionally and unalterably portly. I must forego the hope of tracing my molecules to his daisy fields. After all, as in every strait, we were wise to go at once to the mighty Elizabethan. In his great hand, the vexed thought should mould itself to quiet and measured lines. And how I warm to his graceful flattery, his broad latitude as to mathematical accuracy. Sir Francis, now, would have scanned my meagre proportions, divided his too prudent reckoning by fifteen, and begun his poem with a different fraction, — a seventh, perchance, or a sixth. Not so our Shakespeare, with his round and gracious numbers!
Matter sans spirit, late a part of me,
Shocked by my pain, warm with my ecstasies,
Bathed in the vital flow of very life, —
And viewless now mid incorporeal air,
My lost, invisible, and evaporate self.
If physical fractions are so easy spared,
Who fears the last dim hour of mortal change
When soul from flesh eternally shall part?
Ah well! The sacred names rebuke this irreverent trifling. Let me no more profane the eternal verities with goopish verse. But often, sleepily, when the moonlight stirs on the pear-leaves outside my window and a cricket is singing in the quiet of ‘ the longe night,’ I shall put my hands over my dreamfilled eyes and ponder somewhat sadly about those atoms.