Legends

by Amy Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1921. 12mo, x+259 pp. $2.00.

THIS is an age of innovations, or it esteems itself such. We have contrived to soar above the world, if not above its troubles. We have learned to suppress vice and make men virtuous by due process of law. We have discovered women’s brains and uncovered their persons. We have invented H. G. Wells and Einstein and have forgotten God.

Why then should we not have innovators in poetry? And of all such surely Miss Lowell is the most daring, the most resourceful, the most brilliant. In the present volume her zest for innovation is no less marked than in the earlier ones, and she draws on the widest investigation of old and singular legends for new and startling sensations and effects.

Her subjects are novel. The myths of the Andes tempt her, sun-gods and moon-gods, strange actions of strange creatures, distorted to strange ends by subtle influences unknown to common walkers of the earth. She reads books about China,— she cannot tell us what books, she says, they are so many,— and they inspire her to phantasmagoric narratives of porcelain passions as fragile and sharply stinging as the substance they are made of. She knows the Indian and his lore, and the beatific, sanguine visions that lift him up to heaven and cast him down to earth again, cursed with a boon that cuts him off from all his fellows. If she touches our common world at all, it is preferably through the medium of corpses wind-tossed on midnight gallows, or spectre coaches driven by restless phantoms who cry out for Boston in the brooding horror of a gathering storm.

And the tone in which all these strange matters are treated is as novel as the themes themselves. Ink has ‘a larkspur scent.’ The evening sky is ‘ fruit-green.’ ‘Silver bones dance a whirligig in a crepitation of lust.’ Fire screams and dances and blows blood-whistles, and the scarlet feet of the fire clink a tune of ghost-bells on the shells of the dry canebrakes. All the world knows Miss Lowell’s theories of novelty in metrical form. In this book, as always, she weaves subtle melodies of strange contrasted and responsive music far enough from the old humdrum rhythms that pleased the ears of verse-readers and writers a hundred years ago.

And novelty is excellent, and who will quarrel with it? Yet, after all, some of us feel that Miss Lowell’s unquestioned genius shows itself most in the age-old substance of her work, which is all that gives value to the vagaries and eccentricities of surface. She knows the infinite beauty of words as Homer and Shakespeare knew it, and she is a cunning and a mighty mistress in producing those magical combinations of sound which bring fire in the heart and tears to the eyes. The imagination she works with is the same old imagination that made the glory of Dante and of Keats. There is no novelty about such effects as

yet who can resist them? It is the old, common human soul that gives substance and appeal to ‘The Ring and the Castle’ and ‘The Statue in the Garden’ and ‘Dried Marjoram,’ that makes all our common human souls respond to something in Inca myth and Chinese porcelain and Indian legend. The human heart is an old-fashioned thing, but it is amazingly persistent and engrossing, and when it forms the substance for such novel and splendid embroidery as Miss Lowell’s the embroidery is more apt to touch the souls of men and women. It is the interpretation of plain humanity, with all its longing and hope and anguish and despair, however novel the form, that has charmed men for three thousand years, and will charm them so long as reading and writing afford us the most exquisite refuge from the prosaic ugliness of life.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD.