Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/618

534 catch the fancy (expressions like "If betrayed like rusted grain, in crimson passion dies" and "A falchion's blade to beard a monarch's pique") are more than bizarre; and the "perfecting" of his sonnets, which took Mr. Coles some years, is best apprehended after reading the various erudite apostrophes To Mother, Semper Idem!, War's Apocalypse, and Metathmalion. This is the surprising (in spite of the Foreword) sestet of the last-named:

The poems of the unfortunate Gladys Cromwell betray the hidden thing that wrecked her career. One sees, in practically all of her poems, a fear of this life that is a kaleidoscope of beauty, belligerence, and bestiality. The inability to adjust herself to an insecure and chaotic world is manifested even in her earlier poems which contain some of her finest lyrics. As Gladys Cromwell began to mature, her work took on a more conscious intellectuality, her fancies became more studied, more introspective and even inverted. Many of her best verses, compounded of light and darkness, tremble on the verge of greatness. In poems like. The Mould, Definition, Dominion, and Choice she seems a tentative and somewhat frailer Emily Dickinson, with a less incisive and more indirect idiom.

No doubt this active will, So bravely steeped in sun, This will has vanquished Death And foiled oblivion.

But this indifferent clay, This fine, experienced hand So quiet, and these thoughts That all unfinished stand,