POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
The reviewer may be a little unfair, for of course the poet does not mean the music of Lepanto, which is not in the least strange but all in the key of C and on familiar conceptions.
Very lovely and imaginative is the next stanza of The Strange Music.
In your strings is hid a music that no hand bath e'er let fall,
In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;
Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,
Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow's name.
Then, soon, he praises "the strange music" so very highly that you begin to be sated with it, and then disgusted with it; and at last, when Time, and Life, and Death, are all worsted by it—"and the stars stand still to hear," your soul's final sense is a craving for some minority report on it.
This is the difficulty in reading the works of a determined optimist and booster. Maybe "the strange music" really could achieve all the poet asserts. Maybe the authors of some of the railroad advertisements really could guide you to lands of eternal sunshine. But the skeptic heart of the truth-seeker would have been better persuaded by some more qualified statement—by some half-tones on the subject, and a few of the shades and values of the chromatic scale.
The music and the thought of the Poems seem in general to fail of this perception—though not in The Three Guilds, The Gifts of God, and a delightful piece of satire, The Shakespeare Memorial.
Without questioning the poet's right to his own outlook on the universe, and also without intent of irreverence, it should
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