Robert Bridges' New Book
So I slept enchanted
under my loving tree,
Till from his late resting
the sweet songster of night
Rousing awaken'd me:
Then this—the birdis note—
Was the voice of thy throat
which thou gav'st me to kiss.
The other poem is a brief epigram, bitter as Palladas, full of emotional violence held in by rigid, delicate barriers:
ἐτώδιον ἄχθος ἀρούρης
Who goes there? God knows. I'm nobody. How shall I answer?
Can't jump over a gate nor run across the meadow.
I'm but an old whitebeard of inane identity. Pass on.
What's left of me today will very soon be nothing.
This is worthy of a place in the Greek anthology, not only because it is hard and concise as their epigrams, but because it is novel. It is the only poem I can think of which shows quite this sense of the attrition of personality through living. It is not age which speaks, but a mood that is permanent and recurrent in life, and therefore so fine a matter of art.
The thin volume contains also some whimsical lines on Flycatchers, inspired possibly by the sight of some of his colleagues on the Academic Committee, but the American reader may imagine that it was written about this or that well-known editor, and get from it an equal pleasure. Dr. Bridges recalls the time when, "a chubby young chap," he sat with others on a school form
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