Page:Collected poems of Flecker.djvu/31

 normally the changes were the other way round. He preferred the exact word to the vague; he was always on his guard against the "pot-shot" and the complaisant epithet which will fit in anywhere. With passionate deliberation he clarified and crystallized his thoughts and intensified his pictures.

He found, as has been said, kinship in the French Parnassians: and, though he approached them rather as a comrade than as a disciple, traces of their language, especially perhaps that of de Régnier and Hérédia, may be found in his later verse. A reading of Hérédia is surely evident in the "Gates of Damascus": in


 * Beyond the towns, an isle where, bound, a naked giant bites the ground:
 * The shadow of a monstrous wing looms on his back: and still no sound.

and the stanzas surrounding it. An influence still more marked is that of Sir Richard Burton. Flecker, when still a boy, had copied out the whole of his long "Kasidah," and its rhythms and turns of phrase are present in several of his Syrian poems. It was in the "Kasidah" that Flecker found Aflatun and Aristu, and the refrain of "the tinkling of the camel-bells" of which he made such fine use in "The Golden Journey." The verse-form of the "Kasidah" is, of course, not Burton's, it is Eastern; and the use Flecker made of it suggests that an infusion of Persian and Arabic forms into English verse might well be a fertilizing agent. He always read a great deal of Latin verse: Latin poetry was as much to him as Greek history, myth, xxvii