Not only the Chicago Company recognizes the value of opera in English (TIME, Oct. 4). The Met- ropolitan has scheduled The King's Henchman for March. So thoroughly English is it, say notices, that not a word of the lyrics but is derived directly from the Saxon tongue. The poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay, precocious young lady of Vassar, who published Renascence the same year she received her A. B., 1917.
With her husband Eugen Jan Boissevain, she sought the Maine woods, there to recuperate from long ill-health, to work quietly on the book for The King's Henchman (TIME, Aug. 30). Two months ago, the couple disappeared from their tiny cottage, were seen no more in Maine.
Now, from far away New Mexico, comes rumor that The King's Henchman is completed, is Miss Millay's greatest achievement. According to her host-companion Poet Arthur Ficke, "it begins on a high heroic plane and mounts steadily in dramatic interest. It is mag-nificent." It sings of an English King who despatched his bosom friend, centuries ago, to seek out the Thane of Devon, to bring back word whether the Thane's daughter is really as fair as tradition would have her. On All Hallows' Eve the ambassador beholds the beauty stealing timidly over the moor, her path lighted by a single torch, to test the superstition that thus a maiden may catch a magical glimpse of her future husband. The torchlight falls upon the messenger. He, then, is the man. But the royal will is stern. So runs the plot of the opera. The music, more important to the success of the whole, is being composed by Joseph Deems Taylor.