Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/150

138 fine lines and snatches of songs sweet or impassioned (the first two verses of 'To Walt Whitman in America,' or the first verse of 'The Oblation,' for instance, or others from the 'Mater Dolorosa' or 'A Marching Song'). The studied work, set pieces like 'Siena' and 'Tiresias,' have in them the taint of over-deliberation, a taint curiously demonstrable by the exceedingly fine extracts that can (as usual) be made from both. This is once more a case of the extract giving too high a notion of the whole. Verse like

is very lovely. The quiet insight that we feel in much of the monologue of 'Tiresias' is as pleasant as it is unexpected. Here and there it is like Keats, the Keats of Hyperion:

Or again, with a richer and more individual colour:

One is set wondering whether verse like this will not after all be able to carry on such a poem unshattered down the stream of time. The final poems have