Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/91

Rh to hold, and was very uncomfortable under. (I believe that a good many hold it now besides yourself.) What settled it for me was a super-imposed theory, or view; namely, the theory of contiguity, if I may use such a word for it; by which I mean that unemotional writing which has no claim of itself to verse-form may properly be attracted into verse from its nearness to emotional verse in the same piece. Leave alone plays, some of our best lyrics are not lyrical every moment throughout, but the neutral lines are warmed by the remainder. I would even hold that one of Pope's coldest essays in verse would be legitimate as such, if it were a section of a large emotional poem, and not an independent piece.”

I shall concern myself here with one of his books of verse and with The Dynasts. In Poems of the Past and Present almost every poem has something to say, and says it in a slow, twisted, and sometimes enigmatic manner, without obvious charm, but with some arresting quality, not easy to define or to estimate. It is a grey book, with sad-coloured landscapes, its outlook on the race of Portland Bill, that "engulphing, sinister, ghost place," and on "puzzled phantoms" questioning

In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, half-inarticulate, as he meditates on men and destiny. In one of his poems, an ironical song of science, Nature laments that her best amusement, man, has become discontented with her in his self-discontent. Dumb and blind forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of sleep, turning back lazily to sleep again. Here is a poet who is sorry for nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the things of the earth. There is an atmosphere not easily to be found outside this book, a mysterious, almost terrifying atmosphere which one finds again in the phantom love-poems, the phantom war-poems, and in certain reflective verses. Abstract thought takes form in some given symbol, as in The Church-Builder, with its architectural imagery, its deliberate building up of spiritual horror. Nearly the whole book shivers with winter.