Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/58

POETRY: A Magazine of Verse wooded island as wild as a Sierran valley, and then passing out into the dark lake until the city was a string of jewels in the distance. And at night, when the palaces were hung with lights that trailed gold fringes in the water, when the boats drifted in and out of shadows, and iridescent domes and towers faded off into darkness—then was a passion of great beauty evoked out of dust and fire; for a moment all unreal things were real, and dreams had the hardihood of marble.

No gala city was ever so beautiful as this Columbian City at night. We Americans are wasteful of our treasure, spendthrift even of memories. But this was a consummate perfect thing—let us not cast it away, but keep it in our hearts. H. M.

A certain element in the American literary weeklies and monthlies is still descanting on its opinion that "vers libre won't do." We are expected to read long papers full of abstract and indefinite words saying that "the poet's true freedom," etc., is not to be gained through this gate. The writers must be innocent of any knowledge of the poetic tradition, otherwise they would know that practically all forms of verse date from antiquity: China and India and Greece had free verse before some forgotten Italian got stuck in the beginning of a canzone and called the fragment a sonnet.