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To express democracy as emotion is no light motive for a poet. The monarchical ideal, the militaristic ideal, personified in the figure of king or warrior, has made and unmade nations and inspired half the great poems of the world; but democracy, dethroning both king and warrior, sets up no such appealing figure for art to celebrate. In fact, it sets up no figure at all, and its ideal of human brotherhood flattens easily into a platitude.
Mr. Bynner exalts this ideal to passion by prefiguring it in the love of man and woman. He fuses it, makes it workable, gives it a place and a pedestal, by thus relating the love of many with the love of one. In so doing he accomplishes the difficult task of a poetic exposition of his social philosophy; always presenting that philosophy not through abstractions but through concrete examples—the loves and sorrows of individuals. Gradually he builds up, with beautiful art, and always in the simple diction of everyday speech, a clear and lofty expression of the beauty of human brotherhood, and a prophecy of its universal power in a spiritualized world.
This kind of expository poem is perhaps the most difficult to write so easily does its fire turn to the dust of argument. Now and then Mr. Bynner seems in danger of moralizing, but in almost every case his mood freshens and bears him
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