A PAINTER-POET
Collected Poems, by A. E. The Macmillan Co.
As one reads these poems one has a sense of hearing a deep sound in nature, a sound that becomes more and more significant as one listens to it. The leaves rustle, the fire crackles, a wind rises. But behind these noises is the far, deep sound of a river. How is it that these short poems—very many of them only of three stanzas—give one the sense of fullness and profundity? It is because they are all glimpses of the same river of vision.
No poet of our civilization is so cosmic as "A. E." Man for him is one with the world and one with the heavens. Everything he knows, everything he feels, has a history that is before the stars and suns. His own face reflected in an actual river recalls the brooding of the Spirit over the waters. The sorrow and hopelessness that has entered his own heart is the shadow of the dark age that the world has entered into. The thought in this stanza is not far fetched for him:
We liken love to this and that; our thought
The echo of a deeper being seems:
We kiss, because God once for beauty sought
Within a world of dreams.
Behind these poems is a philosophy that has attracted to A. E. many disciples. His personal thought is explicit in A New World and The Man to the Angel:
I close mine eyes from dream to be
The diamond-rayed again,
As in the ancient hours ere we
Forgot ourselves to men.
[154]
