Edna Worthley Underwood

“ The greater the poet, the richer his evocativeness.
He loved the faint blue light of tardy twilights; and white luminous August, with its restless clouds. He kept always a lingering backward glance toward the magic valleys of childhood.
In many languages I have read the poets of the world, but none have touched me quicker to the keen emotion which blasts the present, and whirls on toward the deeps. Like Goya in painting, he was one of the first to take the important step from the old to the new. In verse-forms, he was one of the path makers. Coll said he had built Silvá an altar in his heart. ”

“ The lightnings fireless as that far night star,
Then fold me in your arms, upon your breast.
O! fold me in your arms! There let me rest,
To watch, idly, the fleeing Storm-God’s car,
Rain-mist so soft it may not mark nor mar
The lily’s leaf—when sleep and dreams are best.
Then on my eyes like rain let kisses fall,
Soft rain that maketh to be sweet the Spring,
And Winter fields like pink pearls shimmering.
The bridal veil of mist fall over all!
From under, as shy crocuses do peep,
New love shall bud and blossom while I sleep. ”

“ Even the old history of commerce of Venice is a thing of delight. Not many romances can equal it.
Nowhere else do days drop away so delightedly. Nowhere else is loneliness wholly without bitterness. There is no other spot in the world where I am myself—where neither years nor place, nor people can touch me. There is no other city where I can so happily support the necessary boredom of living.
My first sight of Venice gave me the greatest emotion, I think I have ever felt. I was tired. I had just journeyed through the Austrian Alps, the Bavarian Alps, and a corner of Switzerland. ”

“ It is not often we find a poet without enthusiasms. Horace had none. He is the only poet of the world without an ideal. He believed, in his indifferent way, with Goethe, that life is more important than art. He could have said with Wilde: “To my life I have given my genius, to my writing, my talent.” He saw it clearly. He judged sanely. It is true, perhaps, that he had toward it, as was his habit, an air of de haut en bas.
His Satires tell his real life. They, strangely enough, are poetry of fact, something which (the poetry of fact) has not been invented again until our day, and Verhaeren. ”

“ Do come and lowly kneel where you sit high—
Soul-naked do I come as humble ones
Who in some fair, far south seek meed of suns—
O! crueller than to them rude Winter’s wing,
Life’s storms to her who seeks such sheltering!
40 XXXII
That little song you sang to me, Dear One,
Has blotted out the present, brought to view
This painted vision that a pagan knew:
Quai of Alexandria, low, fading sun,
Frail, floating, purple night-shadows that run
Across sands deeply bronze, dulled by no dew;
A maid, nude, save for gauze crocus in hue
Through which shines polished flesh like to a sun. ”

“ Only the East with a past that is measureless can be at one and the same moment, bitter and tender, cruel and impassioned. Thousands and thousands of years are necessary to ripen to perfection that rare fruit of Time, the human mind. To twist a Russian proverb to the moment’s need. A young race is not strong; a young apple not sweet.
What an amazing piece of mental architecture Somadeva built long ago, in India in his Ocean of Story. To measure exactly just how petty the art-creative mind of today is, read it! The entire Human Comedy of Balzac would be one little drop to the ocean. ”

“ Red-robed, gold palm-embroiderèd—to Rome—
Gods like unto, with glory good to see,
On cars charioted of ivory,
Through gates triumphal, flower-up-built to dome,
While at their feet the masses moaning roam
And they, joy-drunk, cry:—“Io Triompe!”
Thus, Love, at life’s high noon enter my heart!
(Not like one monkish bred, cringing with fear,
Black clad, furtive of eye for dangers near,)
Come as the Cæsars came! Be that your part,
Bright robed, triumphant, bold for victory,
And o’er my conquered soul cry—“Triompe!”
26 XVIII
You praised my speech to-day. ”

“ And Fombona like Manuel Galvez registered so many of the apparently trifling, overlooked facts that knit up the confusing surface of the present; it resembles the difficult-to-catch, changeful, spread-out shimmer upon a sea.
South Americans picture youth, and the joys of youth, as no one else. One can live over one’s own youth, and then multiple other youths by proxy, in the reading. And every once in a while I come upon a sentence that shakes me with its splendor.
I am impressed by the fact that the literatures that Fombona reads and likes best are French, Italian, Russian. ”

“ Night long there pulses upward on the air
The breath of the great earth-breast’s heat fiercely,
A Titan’s passion like to, first set free
With blackness of the night, exhaustless, there.
A woman, passion-pale, with gems like rain,
Leans listless by stone parapets, again
Lifts arms voluptuous toward where afar
A rider’s armor shines beneath a star,
Her jewels all a-shiver as a pearl
When into ocean depths the sun-rays whirl. ”

“ Le style peut se fatiger, comme l’homme même. Il veillira de même que l’intelligence et la sensibilité dont il est le signe; mais pas plus que l’individu, il ne changera de personalité a moins d’un cataclysme psychologique.
He declares again that style is being able to see, think, feel, and nothing more.
Now that I am no longer young the prose of Loti has the same power, the same almost fateful charm over me, it had in my youth. How he keeps words in place! I did not see my own youth; I saw only his. By it I have kept a proxy perhaps by means of which I shall not grow old. ”

“ My heart is filled with joy like spring-fed streams
By floating, fragile, white mist-billows fanned,
Prismatic curtains by the sun’s light planned,
The substance iridescent of our dreams.
My heart is filled with joy, for Love dwells there,
New Heaven for me making and new Earth—
Love! Love!—the God-dream, that to joy gives birth.
’Tis this I know well makes the world so fair,
’Tis this which is the music all things sing—
The crocus dawn—the sunset crimsoning.
47 XXXIX
Late met we last night by the lake again
When faint for dawn I felt the dark to be ”

“ Here emotion enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have seized it.
I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken, tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor, half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. ”

“ The way to study pictures is not to study them, not to try to know history, nor making, but just to look at them, then keep on looking. The beginning of joy is the beginning of wisdom. The eye trains itself. Like an independent organism, it searches, chooses, judges, until it has distinguished good from bad. Looking at pictures, making no attempt to interpret, to explain, trains vision, until everywhere we turn our heads, we make pictures for ourselves. The eye, without command, instruction, selects, adjusts, keys itself to the artist’s trained seeing. ”

“ Great, ennobling pitifulness which could shelter the world and his neighbor is not of today. We imitate. We do not create. At the test there is sound of something broken. Poetry is language of the emotions. When they are enfeebled they cannot speak. Where is the poet who pays tribute to a brother, a friend? Who is capable of feeling that sways the heart! We are tin toys. Love is of the heart. Without it the intellect can not create. Love was mainspring of those fluent opening lines of Horace, love that vibrated richly in his heart, then attuned it to sympathetic singing. ”

“ The Great War was the demolishing blow to the vast, antique structure, the marble columns of whose first falling echoed thunderously in May, 1787, in France.
In the West there exists dramatic, political idealism; inexperience, youth, together with lack of international outlook. In the West there is still youth, its desire, its progress, a dream suitable for a rich, young, unexploited country permitted for a century to develop undisturbed. Wealth has too often become end, instead of aid to larger living. It has habit of shrinking the horizon of the one who possesses it. ”

“ Dynasty after dynasty had succeeded each other in Persia whose members made either Shiraz, the home of Hafiz, their place of residence, or Ispahan, or Kirman, until at length Tamerlane came along and beheaded them all. Hafiz’ political horizon was like to Heine’s in its uncertainty, and in its change of outlook. Like Heine, he saw world-conquerors sweep away the firm ground from beneath his feet, and he glimpsed far vision of a world in which there should be no inequality. He had the poet’s vision of the future’s justice. The definite facts of Hafiz’ life are few, unsatisfactory. ”

“ There was rain, mist, and continued cold. Then suddenly there blossomed out of the mist and the sea a rich, vari-tinted city—Lisbon. The sun began to shine.
It is a city of glowing gardens, narrow streets, whose painted, stucco dwellings are more than charming—gem-pink, sulphur-yellow, weary violet. They jostle each other in little square places of flowers.
Barefoot women go from door to door to sell fish, carried in baskets upon their heads; slim seminary students in long black, eloquent capes, move about, statues in ivory and jet. And children and girls have the charm of Latin youth. ”

“ It was the old clothes of men’s pleasures gone to rags. For a little while there was general inclination among the people to turn to real life and give over vain dreaming.
Of this healthful, sane impulse, Hafiz was poet, uniting as he did the imaginative reach of Rûmi, with the firm grasp on material things, the worldly wisdom of Saadi. But he was greater than either in artistic sense of form, which in the quatrain attained grace and distinction comparable with Anacreon. After the winter of war this was fertile spring, when life blossomed, and with it, genius. ”

“ Only oriental people, like the Arab, who have known the desert and thirst and the sun’s too direct heat, know how to make gardens. It was one of their perfected arts. And in these gardens they knew how to set pleasure places of unbelievable charm.
All the old gardens of the South, of Latin races, are among the richest enchantments. It takes centuries and wars and changing kings, caprice and madness, and love, to ripen gardens. Money and haste can not do it. A garden, in the finest acceptance of the term, will be impossible in our country for centuries. ”

“ Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders. Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe, less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget, then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical end as was way with the great Frenchmen. ”

“ If you wish to revel in the beauties of the tropics, minus the long voyage to South America, weeks perhaps of sea-sickness, read Chocano, who laughingly calls himself the spirit of the Andes. He has pictured, in ringing verse, this glowing, romantic continent, from which, in days of old, clipper ships, used to go back to Europe with scuppers awash with emeralds, gold, with amethysts. Reading Chocano gives the rich sensations of the tropics. It is like wandering through vast gardens filled with [182] flaming orchids, curious in shape, amazing in color. ”