Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/49

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER wine, in cups and jars, and drunkenness: Po Chü-i returns home, leaning heavily on a friend, at yellow dusk; but there are no raised voices or disturbance; and, soothed by the swallows about the beams, a candle flame in the window, the moon crowning the tide, he hears only the music of flutes and strings. There are roc and phoeniz and red jungle fowl, ibis and cranes and wild swan along the river; women with bright lips sway to the silver tapping of their bells, ladies, long of limb, enter with side glances under moth eye-brows, and after them others with faces painted white, their deep sleeves reeking with scent. But they are only momentary; they are left, plucking vainly at the coats of those who will not stay, and the pure dawn holds a mango-bird singing among flowers.

They are poems that dwell on the green of mulberry trees and fields of hemp, on the oxen in the village streets, the burnished pools of carp, the lotus banks and rice furrows and glittering fret of snow. And there, equally, they are completely in the mood, or, rather, perfections of the attempted mood, of the present. In English lyrical poetry alone, and that, except for John Masefield, the beauty of yesterday and not today, have the settings of life been so beautifully refashioned. An ability of long habited lands; for its power is not in described nature, but the love of a particular soil—feathery bamboo at the door, a hollow of daffodils, are symbols not so much of recurrent seasons as of a deep-rooted passionate attachment for the city of Lo-yang or for the Devon sod. Without sincerity of human emotion words are no better than broken coloured glass.