The Poetry of George Sterling
theme beyond redemption, and in spite of the whole second part, an unhappy afterthought. Already the young poet's brilliant but too facile craftsmanship was tempted by the worst excesses of the Tennysonian tradition: he never thinks—he deems; he does not ask, but crave; he is fain for this and that; he deals in emperies and auguries and antiphons, in causal throes and lethal voids—in many other things of tinsel and fustian, the frippery of a by-gone fashion. He can smother his idea in such pompous phrasing as this:
Shall yet your feet essay, unharmed,
The glare of cosmic leaguers met
Round stellar strongholds gulfward set,
With night and fire supremely armed?
And yet this is the poet, and this the poem, capable at times of lyric rapture:
O Deep whose very silence stuns!
Where Light is powerless to illume,
Lost in immensities of gloom
That dwarf to motes the flaring suns.
O Night where Time and Sorrow cease!
Eternal magnitude of dark
Wherein Aldebaran drifts a spark,
And Sirius is hushed to peace!
O Tides that foam on strands untrod,
From seas in everlasting prime.
To light where Life looks forth on Time
And Pain, unanswered, questions God!
What Power, with inclusive sweep
And rigor of compelling bars,
Shall curb the furies of the stars,
And still the troubling of that Deep?
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