Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/254

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse new design, he makes us feel it with a new poignancy. Life as a shadow-play, men and women as puppets moved by a master-experimentalist for gods who, like the audience, "are kind, but wish to be amused" as they sit with staring eyes—something like this we have heard for thousands of years. And the key to the special motive of this poet's "decoration"—the black-and-white panorama through which his breathing puppets move—is to be found, of course, in Aubrey Beardsley, or even, if we search further, in Japanese prints and Chinese art of the great ages. But every artist builds on the past. If this poet, young and unknown, can line-up his brief tragedy with these masterpieces, he is offering us a large measure to judge him by, and we owe him the record of a triumph.

Mr. Head's Prospero, his omnipotent weaver of dreams, is Capulchard, who with his first speech takes the centre of the black-and-white stage—the framed-in "decoration" beyond which lifeless figures, collapsed, immovable, await behind the veil their chance to appear:

We need not follow the wizard-hero's work as he lifts his human puppets into the frame, and puts them through their paces of passion and sorrow. Through symbols he