POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
leave, if one have laid them by for long enough to have an impression of the book as a whole, and not a confusion, not the many little contradictory impressions of individual poems. . . . His friends, with the sole exception of Mr. Yeats, seem to regard him as a prose writer who inadvertently strayed into verse. His language is formal. It has an old-fashioned kind of precision that is very difficult from the sort of precision now sought, yet, in the dozen places where this stately and meticulous speech is moved by unwonted passion, Lionel Johnson has left poems as beautiful as any in English; as in the poem:
Fair face gone from sight,
·······
Fair lips hushed in death,
Now their glad breath
Breathes not upon our air
Music, that saith
Love only, and things fair.
Or in the poem to O'Leary:
From Howth to Achil, the glad noise
Rings: and the heirs of glory fall.
Or in the poem to Oliver Georges Destrée:
In Merioneth, over the sad moor
Drives the rain, the cold wind blows;
Past the ruinous church door,
The poor procession without music goes.
The curlew cries
Over her laid down beside
Death's lonely people:
Johnson's verse is full of inversion., Having held out for a uniform standard of appreciation, having insisted that one
[314]
