Louise Imogen Guiney

								

again. It would have been impossible for her, at any period, to select
desirable subjects for poetry as the landscape painter marks a lovely
spot in his mind’s eye, to return with tubes and brush. Once she did
own to the tempting exercise of composing a poem in cold blood. It
turned out to be compact of beauties appealing to the public mind, and
she viewed it thenceforth from a hurt and wistful wonder. You might say
she cherished a distaste for it, as being a child of indirect lineage,
a mood disloyal to the greater gods. She was ever the acolyte in that
temple, never beseeching at the altar, but serving it. For she was of
those pilgrims of destiny who are perpetually referring this world to
the pattern of worlds existing before time began. To her, poetry is an
unspoken allegiance to the very essence of mysticism, magic, glamourie.
It is the echo from far hills of space. It is never without the
witchery of the unknown, the guessed-at, the adored but never seen. Not
all its dances are woven under the sky we scan chiefly for the weather,
but in the elusive gleaming where not we but our dreams are denizens.
It is perpetually looking from “magic casements.” It brings the
twilight feeling. It may not be melancholy, yet it inspires melancholy.
It may not be joyous, yet the pleasure it awakens is more exquisite
than it has words to celebrate. These are matters far from the market
where we buy and sell and measure our worth by cleverness in exploiting
it. These are courts where our poet’s “shy foot” dared penetrate with
the confidence of a daughter of the house.
From Songs at the Start to Happy Ending (1909) this last bearing
her stamp as comprising “the less faulty half of all the author’s
published verse,” her work hardly varies in a certain cool, limpid,
sometimes austere content. Songs at the Start is distinctly unlike the
familiar books of perfervid and unbridled youth. Almost childlike, in
some instances, the songs are always restrained within due measure.
The gusts of a too tempestuous heart, the revolt of youth against
a world ready made for it, are not hers. She might be the child of
a pagan ardency of simple joy, singing to the echo in some waking
spring. These are the dewy recognitions of a world “not realized.” The
faults she showed in this first printing are the ones that plagued her
throughout, though she recognized them with a rueful self-dispraise and
mock extravagance of remorse. They are the infrequent lapses of a not
invariably musical ear. To the end, she would, from stanza to stanza,
unconsciously change her cadence. It might be a fault for her to
redress; but who among her lovers would complain of it now? It was an
individual flaw, the little human imperfection like a mole on beauty’s
cheek; the too studied reverse of it might have been something not
only “icily regular” but “splendidly null.”
The White Sail, part legend and part lyric, with an academic ballast