1936 MODERN POETRY

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and grew jealous. He did not belong Landor's lyrics, though her voice is to the Rhymers' Club and I wanted not so deep, but high, thin and to believe that we had all the good sweet: poets; but one evening Charles Ricketts brought me to a riverside house Thine elder that I am, thou must not cling at Richmond and introduced me to Edith Cooper. She put into my un- To me, nor mournful for my love entreat: willing hands Sturge Moore's book And yet, Alcceus, as the sudden spring and made me read out and discuss Is love, yea, and to veiled Demeter' certain poems. I surrendered. I took sweet. back all I had said against him. I was most moved by his poem called The
Dying Swan: 0 silver-throated Swan Struck, struck! a golden dart Clean through thy breast has gone Home to thy heart. Thrill, thrill, 0 silver throat! O silver trumpet, pour Love for defiance back On him who smote! And brim, brim o'er With love; and ruby-dye thy track Down thy last living reach Of river, sail the golden light . . . Enter the sun's heart . . . even teach, 0 wondrous-gifted Pain, teach thou The god to love, let him learn how. than tone of harp, more gold than gold Is thy young voice to me; yet-, ah, the pain To learn, I am beloved now I am old, Who, in my youth, loved, as thou must, in vain. Sweeter

And here is another, which, because it hints at so much more than it says, is very moving:
They bring me gifts, they honor me, Now I am growing old; And wondering youth crowds round my knee, As if I had a mystery And worship to unfold. To me the tender, blushing bride Doth come with lips that fail; I feel her heart beat at my side And cry: 'Like Ares in his pride, Hail, noble bridegroom, hail!'

Edith Cooper herself seemed a dry, precise, precious, pious, finicking old maid; with an aunt, a Miss Bradley, she had written under the name of Michael Field tragedies in the Elizabethan manner, which I seem to remember after forty or fifty years as occasionally powerful but spoiled by strained emotion and labored metaphor. They had already fallen into oblivion, but under the influence of Charles Ricketts she had studied Greek and found a new character, a second youth. She had begun, though 1 did not know it for many years, a series of little poems, masterpieces of simplicity, which resemble certain of

ILL

My generation, because it disliked Victorian rhetorical, moral fervor, came to dislike all rhetoric. In France, where there was a similar movement, a poet had written: 'Take rhetoric , and wring its neck.' People began to imitate old ballads because an old ballad is never rhetorical. I think of

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