For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He
feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--
'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'
So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider
whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or,
if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference
occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
thematic outline itself emerges.
In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
in verse.
Pages:
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144