Men, Women and Ghosts
by Amy Lowell
"`. . . See small portions of the Eternal World that ever groweth': . . . .
So sang a Fairy, mocking, as he sat on a streak'd tulip,
Thinking none saw him: when he ceas'd I started from the trees,
And caught him in my hat, as boys knock down a butterfly."
William Blake. "Europe. A Prophecy."
`Thou hast a lap full of seed,
And this is a fine country.William Blake.
Preface
This is a book of stories. For that reason I have excluded
all purely lyrical poems. But the word "stories" has been stretched
to its fullest application. It includes both narrative poems,
properly so called; tales divided into scenes; and a few pieces
of less obvious story-telling import in which one might say
that the dramatis personae are air, clouds, trees, houses, streets,
and such like things.
It has long been a favourite idea of mine that the rhythms of `vers libre'
have not been sufficiently plumbed, that there is in them a power of variation
which has never yet been brought to the light of experiment.
I think it was the piano pieces of Debussy, with their strange likeness
to short vers libre poems, which first showed me the close kinship
of music and poetry, and there flashed into my mind the idea of using
the movement of poetry in somewhat the same way that the musician uses
the movement of music.
It was quite evident that this could never be done in the strict pattern
of a metrical form, but the flowing, fluctuating rhythm of vers libre
seemed to open the door to such an experiment. First, however,
I considered the same method as applied to the more pronounced
movements of natural objects. If the reader will turn to the poem,
"A Roxbury ...
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