LAMENT A daughter wails by the coffin of her mother: O my little mother! O my little comforter! O my little defender! Thanks unto your little hands that brought me up, thanks unto your little legs that walked beside me, thanks unto your mind that taught me, thanks unto your little mouth that spoke to me so kindly. Who shall speak to me kindly now, who shall teach me kindly? My little mother, who shall defend me now? to whom shall I complain now? with whom shall I speak? The cuckoo of the woods ceases to cry, but I never shall cease. My mother, you do not sigh any more. My mother, you do not groan, my little mother. Say a word to me, give consolation to my mournful little heart. All the night I am trying to talk to you, yet I hear not a word from my little mother. O my little mother, the little guest! O my little mother, the wanderer! Ah, they build for my little mother a home of white boards without a window of glass, without a door. You will not see, my mother, the sun rising, neither the sun setting. The last time, the last little short while now we are talking to each other. Oh, if I could, I would wake up my dear little mother. Lament Oh, when will you come to me, when will you visit me? From which country shall I await you? From which corner shall I greet you? Mother mine, day and night I shall walk, but I'll meet you nowhere, but I'll find you nowhere. II Ah, my little mother, you have left me, a little orphan, and now where am I to go, where am I to conceal myself, where find a shelter? Ah, every wind will blow on me now, every rain will find me now. O my little mother, the summer will come, the cuckoo will cry in the woods, and I shall think that those are the words of my mother. I shall come to the grave of my little mother, and there on the path I'll find the green grass growing and the white little clovers curling. My father, my old wise head, will you recognize my little mother there? Oh, my father, meet my little mother, I pray you, take her by her white little hands, and place her on the bench of the Souls of the Dead. O my little mother, say thanks unto your young little brothers and your little neighbors who build for you a new little home without windows and without doors. Oh, my little mother, how will you bear the new boards? Oh, how will you bear the brown earth on you? From a Lithuanian folk-song-translated by EDITORIAL COMMENT VARIOUS VIEWS OMEWHERE I have read a quaint old myth of a goblin who, blowing the fog out of his face, started a tempest which went careering around the world. Now and then I feel like that goblin. Is it possible that less than four years ago poetry was "the Cinderella of the arts"? Already a great wind is blowing her ashes away, and on the horizon are rolling dust-clouds which may conceal a coach and four-or is it an automobile? For there must be some gift of the gods in the large and many-colored cloud of words which fills our eyes and ears. Never before was there so much talk about poetry in this western world, or so much precious print devoted to its schools and schisms. This is at it should be, no doubt. It may be evidence of that "poetic renaissance" which some of us profess already to be living in; or at least it may initiate that "great audience" which will be ready for the renaissance when it comes. A breach has been made, we may hope, in that stone wall of public apathy which tended to silence the singer ere he began. By and by he may win-who knows?-academic honors, prizes, travelling scholarships, admission to Arts Clubs and American Academies at Rome, even prices that would mean "a living wage." The different points of view from which modern poetry may be regarded have been conveniently epitomized this Various Views spring in Chicago by a number of lecturers. We may pass over Mr. Masefield, because his talk did not touch upon his contemporaries, and come to the series given at the Little Theatre by Mr. Maurice Browne, Miss Amy Lowell, and Mr. Arthur Ficke. Mr. Browne dealt chiefly with the spiritual austerities of the art. He warned us-the American people-that we were shirking truth, shirking life, and that our poets, with few exceptions, were too consistently expressing this attitude. He repeated the familiar-and, I think, essentially superficial-accusation that our ideals are wholly material, and compared our contemporary poetry unfavorably with that of England-a land which seemed to him, under the stress of war, vibrant with beautiful and noble song. Although some of us could not agree with this estimate of relative values, and even wondered whether the speaker had penetrated to the heart of our democracy, we were stirred by his plea for the primal simplicities, the austere aspirations, which underlie great poetry. Miss Lowell was more specific. Her subject was the new movement in poetry, which began, she was gracious enough to say, with the publication of our first number, in October, 1912. She grouped the more significant first appearances around this date, Pound coming a little before, and Lindsay, Frost, Lawrence, Sandburg, Masters, the imagists and the Georgian group a little later. By the new movement she meant that definite separation from the Victorian tradition-that greater austerity of meaning, economy of phrase and freedom of rhythmic movement of which imagism, her special topic, became one important manifestation. The heredity of the new movement may be traced, she thought, in two streams: the imagists from Coleridge and Poe, through the French symbolists whom these two poets greatly influenced; and other free-verse poets from Whitman, who, though almost without prototype, may be considered something of an admixture of the ethical spirit of Wordsworth with the free, beauty-loving spirit of Coleridge. The speaker then presented, in her most brilliant and persuasive manner, her ideas of the laws and boundaries of imagism, confining her discussion of it chiefly to the group represented in the Houghton-Mifflin anthologies. Mr. Ficke's contribution to the symposium was a plea for the older forms. Free verse he thought an instrument of narrow range, and imagism effective only in the presentation of detached details, incapable of larger completeness. The poet finds freedom, he thought, only in chains; the closer his metric, the greater his joy in fitting his pace to the pattern of its measures. And finally, before the Fortnightly, the oldest of Chicago's women's clubs, Mr. Witter Bynner disposed of the "new movement" altogether. Modern poetry-his topic confined him to British poets-began, in his opinion, with Kipling and the Shropshire Lad, it continues with Alfred Noyes and Masefield and Moira O'Neill (who is greater than Yeats!), and the dear public is always right about it. He was vagarious enough to admit that Mr. Hueffer's On Heaven, though neither Kiplingesque nor Noyesy, is the |