the moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim
Nov. 3rd, 2012 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerReading Jessie B. Rittenhouse's The Younger American Poets, a survey of the American poetry scene in 1904.
I should have been an earlier twentieth century writer, you guys. Their passionate love affair with punctuation astounds me: they combine colons, semi-colons, and dashes in one sentence and make it not merely readable, but graceful.
With the American poet in the present day, despite their feeling for nature, it is rather her beauty in the abstract than any particular locality with which they chance to be associated, that inspires them, - though Mr. Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, furnishes a marked exception to this statement, - but the Canadian poets, with a passion like that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew their first devotion: now with a buoyant infectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a sympathetic identity with their country, an interchange of personality by which they reciprocally express each other.
That is all one sentence.
And it brings me to the other thing I like about the prose of the period, which is its deep-steeped pleasure in nature, and its consequent willingness to fly into metaphor. The artist "must make the detached and fragmentary beauty a typical revelation; the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as the moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim the fulness to which it is orbing."
It is one of the tragedies of American poetry at that time that its practitioners, despite the depth and sincerity of their affection for nature, could not match the grace and power of the prose writers, and produced in the main treacly dreck.
This one, however, I think deserves a second life, if only for the image of the storm mists as enormous spider web.
Before the Rain
by Madison Cawein
Before the rain, low in the obscure east,
weak and morose the moon hung, sickle gray;
around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased,
wove an enormous web, wherein it lay
like some white spider hungry for its prey.
Vindictive looked the scowling firmament,
in which each star, that flashed a dagger ray,
seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.
I should have been an earlier twentieth century writer, you guys. Their passionate love affair with punctuation astounds me: they combine colons, semi-colons, and dashes in one sentence and make it not merely readable, but graceful.
With the American poet in the present day, despite their feeling for nature, it is rather her beauty in the abstract than any particular locality with which they chance to be associated, that inspires them, - though Mr. Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, furnishes a marked exception to this statement, - but the Canadian poets, with a passion like that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew their first devotion: now with a buoyant infectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a sympathetic identity with their country, an interchange of personality by which they reciprocally express each other.
That is all one sentence.
And it brings me to the other thing I like about the prose of the period, which is its deep-steeped pleasure in nature, and its consequent willingness to fly into metaphor. The artist "must make the detached and fragmentary beauty a typical revelation; the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as the moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim the fulness to which it is orbing."
It is one of the tragedies of American poetry at that time that its practitioners, despite the depth and sincerity of their affection for nature, could not match the grace and power of the prose writers, and produced in the main treacly dreck.
This one, however, I think deserves a second life, if only for the image of the storm mists as enormous spider web.
Before the Rain
by Madison Cawein
Before the rain, low in the obscure east,
weak and morose the moon hung, sickle gray;
around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased,
wove an enormous web, wherein it lay
like some white spider hungry for its prey.
Vindictive looked the scowling firmament,
in which each star, that flashed a dagger ray,
seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.
