Queen, wife and mother, and the thing you are, Old age is heir Apparent to the majesty of Death, And thought of the impending royalty Softening the manners, and should awe the heart Of youth-that churl of nature! Yet somehow this hot romantic liquid is run into a mould, is arrested into a dignified shape and petrified. Here again is the free union between the classic and romantic. So too with her passion, for I do not want to give the impression that "Michael Field” is cool as moonlight. She is more passionate than Flecker, who, even at his best, is a trifle frosty. But what I am anxious to make clear is that the difference between the Imagists and Flecker, " Michael Field," and one or two other poets I have in my epistolary mind, is not one between poets with technique and poets without. Both parties have it, on the contrary. The Imagists indeed are simply a division in the array of the pseudopicturesques. They set themselves to break from artistic tradition; they reflect in little the dark and terrible discords of modern life, and they exploit style. They wrench technique away from its proper and secondary duties, and pervert it into a bauble. But the poets of this other group make no such divorce. They study and learn technique in precisely the same way as a man of serious occupation must study and learn his job. They use it upon this vision or poetic feeling or sense of beauty simply as a preliminary but indispensable means to the poetic knowledge, which, in its final triumph, is form. Had they achieved form, they could have discarded technique. Thus "Michael Field's" poetry should endure after the Roaring Boys have made their last riot through the streets of what the Americans have no doubt called Apolloville. As a counter weight to the presentists (that is their right name—not futurists), I have another poet to introduce to you. What if I call up a poet who, by a propriety of metre as devoted in its way as any tinkling rhyme spun out of gossamer and the pollen of daffodillies, actually beats the makers of images at their own game? His name is John Banister Tabb, and he died a few years ago. He was an American by birth, and in the Civil War was a cabin-boy in a blockade ship. That seems to have been his only earthly adventure, for he became a priest, and retired to an Ecclesiastical College in one of the Southern States. In his declining years he became blind. Nor is he many leagues from the resting-place of blind Thamyris and blind Mæconides, prophets old-John B. Tabb, poetic traveller from the States. Whether English readers are well acquainted with him, I do not know. Burns and Oates issued a selection of his poems in 1910, edited and with a little postcript by Mrs. Meynell. But I am quite sure that he has not and never had a tithe of the reputation possessed even by a wretched poetaster like Ezra Pound. He is not in the currency of discussion to anything like the same extent as even a comparatively secluded poet like Ralph Hodgson, whose "Song of Honour" (you will pardon so short and excusable a parenthesis) is one of the finest poems of this century. Nor is he included in that (literally) weighty volume, "The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse." I believe that, as a matter of fact, he did appear in a volume of living poets, edited by William Archer. It had woodcut portraits, which would have made the murder of Mr. Archer by any of the authors so delineated a justifiable homicide. His work is nearly all religious, and I can do nothing better than dash you out half a dozen of his poems without more ado: "THE SMITER": "They bound Thine eyes and questioned, Tell us now Who smote Thee?' Thou wast silent, when to-day Mine eyes are holden, and again they say, 'Who smote Thee?' Lord, I tell them it is Thou." "NATURE" : "It is His garment; and to them Who touch in faith its utmost hem He, turning, says again, ‘I see That virtue hath gone out of Me.' ” "THE MID-SEA SUN": "No peak to hide his splendour till the day "THE HAUNTED Moon": "Still closer doth she cowl with night Her visage white, To hide her from the spectre grey Of yesterday, Deep buried in his sepulchre To all but her." "A SUNSET": "What means it, Lord? No Daniel Is it the Babylonian doom. A midnight monarch to assume The majesty of Day?" And this translunary rapture on his blindness, "Give us this day our daily bread and light : In twilight, where my fellow-men were seen It passes; and amid the falling rain Of tears, I lift, O Lord, mine eyes to Thee, "Fiat I had meant to quote nothing but his short lyrics. They are what he mostly writes, and there seems to me something queerly appropriate in the fact that they were |