Louise Imogen Guiney

								

of sonnets, sang out in fuller tone, though with no less individual a
measure. The legends ring curiously scholastic in these days when the
industrious versifier celebrates the small beer of his own “home town”
in untrained eccentricities all too faithful to his villageous mood.
Her legends were the tall pines of the fairy grove she wandered in.
There were pillared aisles and porticos, not New England dooryards,
tapestries shaken by winds of the past, not leaves, red and gold,
blown her from the swamps and hills she knew. Yet her bookish fetters
were straining from within, and in Daybreak she sings out with a more
individual note, a faint far music, as if some young chorister dared
part the antiphonal ranks of ordered service and try the song he heard
that morning when he and the lark together saluted the hills of dawn.



    “The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea.

     Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee:

     Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere henceforth on me.



    “Up with the banners on the height, set every matin bell astir!

     The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew’s on phlox and lavender:

     Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of morning beats with her.”
This she did not reclaim for the authorized last printing, and none can
say whether she would let us snatch it out of its young obscurity. But
it is so unmistakably one of the first trial flights of the pure lyric
in her, it sings so melodiously, that the mere chronology of her work
demands it. In the same book beats the haunting refrain:



    “Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.”
And as you are about to close the door on this virginal chamber of
April airs and cloistral moonlight, of ordered books breathing not
leather only but the scent of “daffodilean days,” your heart rises up,
for here is The Wild Ride, a poem which first beat out its galloping
measure in a dream, and continued, with the consent of her own critical
mind, to the last book of all. The beginning and the end are like
nothing so much as the call of youth and the answer of undaunted age.
It was, one may guess, her earliest lyric runaway, the first time she
lost herself in the galloping rush of a stanza’s trampling feet.



    “I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses

    All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,

    All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.



    “Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle

    Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,

    With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.



    “The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;

    There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:

    What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.