Page:Collected poems of Flecker.djvu/22

 last term, and little in "Danae's Cradle-Song for Perseus" (1902). A typical couplet is
 * Waste of the waves! O for dawn! For a long low level of shore!
 * Better be shattered and slain on the reef than drift evermore.

Both rhythm and language are Tennysonian, and the alliterative Tennysonianism at the end of the first line is repeated in a "Song" of 1904 beginning:
 * Long low levels of land
 * And sighing surges of sea,
 * Mountain and moor and strand
 * Part my beloved from me.

A "Dream-Song" of 1904 is equally conventional, though in the lines
 * Launch the galley, sailors bold,
 * Prowed with silver, sharp and cold,
 * Winged with silk and oared with gold,

may be seen the first ineffective attempt to capture an image that in various forms haunted Flecker to the end of his life. But the most numerous and, on the whole, the best of his early poems are translations. And this is perhaps significant, as indicating that he began by being more interested in his art than in himself. Translating, there was a clearly defined problem to be attacked; difficulties of expression could not be evaded by changing the thing to be expressed; and there was no scope for fluent reminiscence or a docile pursuit at the heels of the rhyme. xviii