WINE FROM THESE GRAPES—Edna St. Vincent Millay—Harper ($2).
NOT MINE TO FINISH—Genevieve Taggard—Harper ($2).
Sappho was thought unladylike not so much because of her personal habits as because of the poetry she wrote. But Sappho has many a sister in these westering years. Since poets generally discarded their priestlike function for that of self-mindreaders, women have flocked to join the profession and some of them have gone to the head, or near it, of their respective specialties. Last week two U. S. lady poets, whom repute places high above the ruck of feminine poetasters, smote their lyres in unison.
As usual, hurrying U. S. citizens paused to give ear to Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Some were impressed by Publisher Harper's proud announcement that two editions of her book had been exhausted before publication date, but many more looked forward to drinking in another recital of carefully muted chamber music. Many a reverent reader, mindful of the Olympian thunders her Fatal Interview brought down,* doffed his hat before he tiptoed into the audience. But plain readers soon discovered that Wine from these Grapes was a good but by no means a great performance.
Such readers are often made uneasy by the linguistic vagaries of contemporary poets. But Edna St. Vincent Millay is still a lucid poet. Though it is a modern belief that poets, to be audible at all, must speak in an original voice. Poet Millay's originality lies not in a surprisingly exact vocabulary but in the fainter, pleasanter flavor of language reminiscent of poetry-at-large. Though her studied verse sometimes sounds too consciously traditional, such classic artifice as the following will have charm for most readers:
Oh, what a shining town were Death
Woke you therein, and drew your breath,
My buried love; and all you were,
Caught up and cherished, even there.
Those evil windows loved of none
Would blaze as if they caught the sun.
Woke you in Heaven, Death's kinder name,
And downward in sweet gesture came
From your cold breast your rigid hand,
Then Heaven would be my native land.
But you are nowhere: you are gone
All roads into Oblivion.
Whither I would disperse, till then
From home a banished citizen.
A poet but a lady poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay writes not only valentines but epitaphs in lines less mighty than aristocratic. Even when she compares a woman's breasts to wild carrot and onion blossoms or describes the mating of dinosaurs, she contrives to make neither an uncouth nor an arresting gesture. At the sight of a new sonnet sequence critics may hitch up to their typewriters and look for unstruck keys, but ordinary readers will prefer Poet Millay's less pretentious quatrains:
Man, with his ready answer,
His sad and hearty word,
For every cause in limbo,
For every debt deferred,
For every pledge forgotten,
His eloquent and grim
Deep empty gaze upon you,—
Expect no more from him.