“THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT”
[Included in this volume because, although not an address or a state paper, it was written by Mr. Roosevelt while President. It was published in a recent number of “The Outlook”]
The “twilight of the poets” has been especially gray in America; for poetry is of course one of those arts in which the smallest amount of work of the very highest class is worth an infinity of good work that is not of the highest class. The touch of the purple makes a poem out of verse, and if it is not there, there is no substitute. It is hard to account for the failure to produce in America of recent years a poet who in the world of letters will rank as high as certain American sculptors and painters rank in the world of art.
But true poems do appear from time to time, by Madison Cawein, by Clinton Scollard, by Maurice Egan, and others; such are the poems in Bliss Carman’s “Ballads of Lost Haven”; and such are the poems in Edward Arlington Robinson’s “The Children of the Night.”
It is rather curious that Mr. Robinson’s volume should not have attracted more attention. There is an undoubted touch of genius in the poems collected in this volume, and a curious simplicity and good faith, all of which qualities differentiate them sharply from ordinary collections of the kind. There is in them just a little of the light that never was on land or sea, and in such light the objects described often have nebulous outlines; but it is not always necessary in order to enjoy a poem that one should be able to translate it into terms of mathematical accuracy. Indeed, those who admire the coloring of Turner, those who like to read how—and to wonder why—Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, do not wish always to have the ideas presented to them with cold, hard, definite outlines; and to a man with the poetic temperament it is inevitable that life should often appear clothed with a certain sad mysticism. In the present volume I am not sure that I understand “Luke Havergal”; but I am entirely sure that I like it.
Whoever has lived in country America knows the gray, empty houses from which life has gone. It is of one of these that “The House on the Hill” was written.
The next poem, “Richard Cory,” illustrates a very ancient but very profound philosophy of life with a curiously local touch which points its keen insight. Those who feel poetry in their marrow and fibre are the spiritual heirs of the ages; and so it is natural that this man from Maine, many of whose poems could have been written only by one to whom the most real of lives is the life of the American small town, should write his “Ballade of Broken Flutes”—where “A lonely surge of ancient spray told of an unforgetful sea”;—should write the poem beginning
and the very original sonnet on Amaryllis, the last three lines of which are:
Some of his images stay fixed in one’s mind, as in “The Pity of the Leaves,” the lines running:
Sometimes he writes, as in “The Tavern,” of what most of us feel we have seen; and then again of what we have seen only with the soul’s eyes.
I shall close by quoting entire his poem on “The Wilderness,” which could have been written only by a man into whose heart there had entered deep the very spirit of the vast and melancholy Northern forests:
Mr. Robinson has written in this little volume not verse but poetry. Whether he has the power of sustained flight remains to be seen.