BY
AMY LOWELL
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY AMY LOWELL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1918
REPRINTED OCTOBER, 1918; MARCH, DECEMBER, 1919;
MARCH, 1922; DECEMBER, 1924; DECEMBER, 1925
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE * MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
I turn the page and read...
. . .
The heavy musty air, the black desks,
The bent heads and the rustling noises
In the great dome
Vanish...
And
The sun hangs in the cobalt-blue sky,
The boat drifts over the lake shallows,
The fishes skim like umber shades through the undulating weeds,
The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns,
And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle
About the cleft battlements of Can Grande's castle..."
Richard Aldington. "AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM."
PREFACE
The four poems in this book are more closelyrelated to one another than may at first appear.They all owe their existence to the war, for Isuppose that, had there been no war, I shouldnever have thought of them. They are scarcelywar poems, in the strict sense of the word, norare they allegories in which the present is madeto masquerade as the past. Rather, they arethe result of a vision thrown suddenly back uponremote events to explain a strange and terriblereality. "Explain" is hardly the word, for toexplain the subtle causes which force men, oncein so often, to attempt to break the civilizationthey have been at pains to rear, and so obligeother, saner, men to oppose them, is scarcely theprovince of poetry. Poetry works moredeviously, but perhaps not less conclusively.
It has frequently been asserted that anartist lives apart, that he must withdrawhimself from events and be somehow above andbeyond them. To a certain degree this istrue, as withdrawal is usually an inherentquality of his nature, but to seek such awithdrawal is both ridiculous and frustrating. Foran artist to shut himself up in the proverbial"ivory tower" and never look out of the windowis merely a tacit admission that it is hisancestors, not he, who possess the faculty ofcreation. This is the real decadence: to seethrough the eyes of dead men. Yet to-daycan never be adequately expressed, largelybecause we are a part of it and only a part.For that reason one is flung backwards to atime which is not thrown out of proportionby any personal experience, and which onthat very account lies extended in somethinglike its proper perspective.
Circumstances beget an interest in likecircumstances, and a poet, suddenly findinghimself in the midst of war, turns naturallyto the experiences of other men in other wars.He discovers something which has alwayshitherto struck him as preposterous, that lifegoes on in spite of war. That war itself isan expression of life, a barbaric expression onone side calling for an heroic expression onthe other. It is as if a door in his braincrashed open and he looked into a distanceof which he had heard but never before seen.History has become life, and he stands aghastand exhilarated before it.
That is why I have chosen Mr. Aldington'spoem as a motto to this book. For it isobvious that I cannot have experienced whatI have here written. I must have got it frombooks. Bu