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Other Books of Verse

seems to have lost its appeal to-day? But here is a thing that surely moves us-Winds in the Marshes, with its sweep of freshness; also these lines:

So walks the wonder up and down,

Still lovely and unseen.

In spite of "it does," "it doth," and such archaic phrasing, which mar much of this poet's best work, such lines as—

When you, white flower of my life,

Bloom out upon my dream—

and others of like fragrance, make atonement.

The book

leaves an impression of beauty and sincerity, and of power to catch and hold the dream.

A. F.

The Christmas Trail and Other Poems, by Shirley Harvey. Privately printed.

The Christmas Trail is a little book of college verse by a likable boy. The campus at night, tobacco, the crying melancholy of youth, speculations on death-these fill the pages. Yet there is an occasional lift to something beyond, and a humorous felicity of phrase that give good promise for the future. This for instance:

Here's to

The little poets of little thought and song
Who sing so carelessly-and jog along;
Who without thought of critic or of gain,
Go spattering lyrics like an April rain!

E. T.

SPECIAL EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

The Sonnets of Shakespeare, Variorum Edition, edited by Raymond M. Alden. Houghton Mifflin Company.

With this work-the first of the kind in its field-Professor Alden of Stanford University makes a scholarly contribution toward the celebration of the Shakespeare tercentenary. His book will serve to supplement the Furness variorum edition of the plays; indeed, it enjoys the countenance of the younger Furness, under whom that great enterprise is now continuing.

Professor Alden brings together everything that has been written about the Sonnets through two centuries. He does not attempt, however, to blend all these various rays of light into the one white light of truth. Are the Sonnets autobiographical, or imaginative, or esoteric? You may decide for yourself. How about their proper order, with its effect on the story they tell? Confusion-how much or little let the self-confident say. How are we to take the dedication— those thirty words which have produced more puzzled comment than any equal number of words ever put to paper? The data, the many arguments pro and con, are here, and you may form your own conclusion. How about the Dark Lady? "The ghost of Mary Fitton is not yet wholly at peace." How about the Rival Poet? The Chapman theory, while the likeliest, "has been accepted with decidedly uncritical assurance." Who, who is "Mr. W. H."? ""There is'"-here we quote doubly-" "something sad about working over a vexed problem and getting in the end only nega

tive results.'"

Special Editions and Translations

But all the materials for treating every vexed point are present; so the reader may struggle for himself: the editor has "listened to all the schools of intepretation without having become a proselyte of any."

A new era for the study of the Sonnets opened with the examination of the French poets of the half-century preceding Shakespeare. Mr. Alden is somewhat influenced-as who would not be?-by Lee's French Renaissance in England, with its demonstration that most of the matter and manner in vogue during the Elizabethan sonnet-craze comes straight from Ronsard and his mates of the Pléiade, particularly Jodelle and Du Bellay. In these men we find the impassioned appeals to a high-born patron, the warning that youthful beauty will perish utterly unless it propagate itself; the promise of enduring fame through poetical celebration, and even the denunciation of a false mistress of dark complexion. The consequent view that the Sonnets were written in a kind of competitive following of a lyrical fashion of the Renaissance has naturally been bolstered up by the scientifically-minded Germans-by Wolff, for example. But even here our editor saves himself. Such critics, he feels, are "too little disposed to realize the extent to which an artificial form may ́express a real experience and be saturated by personal feeling."

And here, it may be, is the way out. Shakespeare happened to be a great poet; and a great poet cannot keep up a mere literary exercise through an hundred and fifty-four sonnets. Grant that he began as the follower of a rather

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trivial and shallow convention: the instrument in hand presently showed itself worthy of better and deeper use. Say that our poet, with much in his heart and much on his mind, and possibly something on his conscience, began by splashing and frolicking idly with others on the edge of the vast sea: the waves beckoned, the waters became deeper and wilder, and soon he was involved, chindeep or more, in a desperate life-struggle with real and'rending passion-a struggle that, later, made possible Hamlet and Lear and brought him through, saved, to the reconciling amenities of The Tempest. Those who have lived in the Sonnets most deeply will not incline to accept any mechanistic or fictional or mystical mode of accounting for them.

The present volume, a high credit both to editor and pub-
lishers, must necessarily become part of every library whose
owner accepts Shakespeare as Shakespeare and seeks to
understand him.
H. B. F.

The Song of Roland, translated by Leonard Bacon. Yale
University Press.

To the two hundred and ninety-two laisses of this ancient literary monument Mr. Bacon adds, by interpolation, a considerable number drawn conscientiously from other sources than the Oxford text. Let us proceed at once to Laisse cxxxv, in which Roland blows his first blast:

The mighty horn Count Roland hath put his lips unto.

He held it well within them, and with all his strength he blew.
And high are all the summits, and oh, the way is long,

But a full fifteen good leagues away they heard it echo strong.
This is a fair sample of the style, which can hardly be

Special Editions and Translations

said to start a new era in the translation of old epics. The translator "feels certain that a work like the Song of Roland is susceptible of many interpretations." Hence, despite the existence of "several excellent versions in prose and verse," he "has not hesitated to attempt one of his own." The effort shows much faithful industry, but not every reader will feel that it was rewarded. H. B. F.

Madonna Dianora, A Play in Verse, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated from the German by Harriet Betty Boas. Richard G. Badger.

On the enveloping paper cover of this play, we read: “Madonna Dianora is Pelléas and Mélisande set to music." Why mar at the outset a book deserving of praise and confidence? In the first place, Pelléas and Mélisande is in itself the very essence of tone. In the second place, it needs no musical setting other than the exquisite gold of Debussy's opera. In the third place, how can one play be the musical setting of another play?

The translator, has brought feeling and art into her English rendering. The play alternates prose and blank verse. To go back to the suggestion of Pelléas and Mélisande-as a rule the Germans are matter-of-fact even in their love and romance, therefore Hofmannsthal's work, strong though it be, lacks the elusive, I might say, the stealthy, quality of Maeterlinck's. And how different is Dianora from our shrinking little Mélisande !-Dianora, who could, even when seized by the intense horror of approaching death, exult in flinging at her husband truth upon truth of her sin!

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