Prophecy By MURRELL EDMUNDS Once an old man took me by the hand, And pointing through the twilight to the sea, I heard the muffled tread of many feet, I heard the breakers shouting in the night And little structures crumbling to decay El Greco By JAMES FEIBLEMAN With circular circumstances become insidious, Reflects no image here much less than hideous, To slide my tourist into nether rapture, Book Reviews NOTES ON WHAT'S O'CLOCK (What's O'Clock, by Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin Co. W THAT'S O'CLOCK is an admirably balanced book, good to read in that its variety is a perpetual stimulant; rich to read in that it is compact of those things only Amy Lowell could give us. Were it all that she had left it were a generous legacy-but there is more as yet to come: including a volume of New England narratives to be called East Wind, another volume of lyrics, and one of prose essays. So the final estimate of her work cannot yet be written. This volume is representative of Amy Lowell at her best. The exquisite finish of her style is here present unflawed, but its brilliance is somewhat chastened-happily subdued, for it allows the essential simplicity and tenderness of her nature to be the more clearly revealed. She was, in her armour of meteoric aggressiveness, intensely feminine. The sheer brilliance of her decor and the legend of her personality have in some quarters obscured what she has always been—a "human" poet. There can be no mistaking it in What's O'Clock. Perhaps too Amy Lowell was growing older. The swift and flexible mind was losing none of its speed, but was gaining in mellowness, was acquiring that quality no young poet ever has -generous pity. Comprehension she had always had. Her style has always been a curiously supple thing, ranging from the severe to the highly ornate, adaptable to its subject and her topics have been legion. Metaphor, swift and brilliant, has been its unifying quality in every mood. And it is illuminating that though her exotic interiors, her lavishness of porcelain and brocade bulk large in her work, the windy brightness of the metaphors which dominate her style comes almost always from the out-ofdoors: Your voice is like bells over roofs at dawn When a bird flies And the sky changes to a fresher colour. Even the vividness of her interiors is built out of her sensitiveness to the textures of fruits and the colour of flowers and the clearness of air. It is the same with something so definitely closed in as the sultry passion of a scene of the Arabian nights: He will lean above you, Scheherezade, like September above an orchard of apples. He will fill you with the sweetness of spicefed flames. Will you burn, Scheherezade, as flowers burn in September sunlight? In contrast to such (What's O'clock is a book of contrasts) is the "Song for a Viola D'Amore", very simple and charming, a love poem of clematis and twilight. Simplicity is turned to another and terrible effect in "Evelyn Ray" which is the story of a cat-bird singing immoderately over a sunny meadow where men kill one another for a woman. It is a ballad, but a sophisticated ballad, the only sort we are likely to get nowadays. And "Time's Acre" is sophisticated also with its glint of the macabre and its intensity. But it is pointless to name the good poems where there are so many-new ones and old favorites such as "Lilacs". I quote one more passage to indicate the sort of thing one is likely to discover anywhere in the book. (This passage for example is rather lost in a long poem which is not quite worthy of it.) He found her there, Her slender shadow stretching to the door But of all, "Lilacs" is I think the most significant poem. Amy Lowell had come home to New England. China was an adventure-a splendid plundering foray of the spirit. But in the last years of constant pain she came closer to her own soil and people. The dazzle of her own sun gleams on her windowpanes and the scent of her own wet lawns is in her nostrils. She had never forgotten it in her grand tour of the spirit: she was never so close to it as upon return. The inclusion of the prose epigrams makes it unusual and more interesting. Here are three of them: EVOLUTION Now that I am sunk under the sea, a tall and ancient city built of steel and stone, those within my walls are no longer men, but fishes, yet the change is well enough. ALONE You think that you are near me, little one-lying on my shoulder, comforted. But there is a gulf between us two, alas, and between all others, deeper and darker than the abyss that holds the evening from the morning star. THE BAYONET Do not struggle, dear friend. do not try to rise. See, the shaft is broken sharp off in your breast; wait a little; lie still and wait for the surgeon while I put this water to your lips. O dear friend, be quiet; your hands are bleeding from the edge. This is from "Winter Song:" When the gold has left the bough Come the dark, and end the year, Here is "Prayer from the Cliff:" Blind me with night and sea; Let the tall tides build upon me, Covering me. She I loved is dead-is lying, This is the "Dedication:" She said though you should weave and freeze She said, though you should sing and set You shall make nothing lovely then There are a number of poems in the volume, good in whole or in part, among them "The Time when I was Plowing," "Prayer after Youth," "Rain Fugue," "End-All," "Beatrice Dead," "In Winter," "Dust "Dust Remembering," "St. Agnes' Morning," "Variation on an Old Theme," "Lady Titania," "The Fire is Out in Acheron," "Earth Evanescent," "When we Have Heard That Time is only Seeming," "The Beggar God," "Storm Flower" and "Judith of Minnewaukan." JOHN MCCLURE. NEGRO SONGS The Book of American Negro Spirituals, Edited with an Introduction by James Weldon Johnson. The Viking Press. 1925. On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, by Dorothy Scarborough. Harvard University Press. 1925. Folk-Songs of the South, Collected Under the Auspices of The West Virginia Folk-Lore Society, and Edited by John Harrington Cox. Harvard University Press. 1925. The Negro and His Songs, A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South, by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. The University of North Carolina Press. 1925. THE that America is beginning to take some notice of its chief autochthonous art. In 1903, thirty years after the Fisk Jubilee Singers had made their first appearance before American and European audiences, one of the leaders of his race, W. E. B. DuBois, said mournful things about the respect accorded Negro music. Dr. DuBois's words, however, proved that his prophesies about music were less dependable than his prophesies about history, economics, or whatever it is he sets forth in the classroom. The seriousness with which Negro music, particularly the Spirituals, is taken by first-rate musicians today points to the inescapable conclusion that this great body of childlike, mystical, passionate songs is America's chief, if not sole, genuine music. And it is only when "improved" conditions and a consequent loss of the ignorant carefreeness of the Negro threaten to place these songs beyond redaction that a widespread effort is made thoroughly and systematically to collect them. Lafcadio Hearn some years ago did valuable work in recording a great many of the songs in Creole patois, and much later H. E. Krehbiel brought out a scholarly collection of what he chose to call “Afro-American Folk Songs." More recently T. P. Fenner, John W. Work, Natalie Curtis Burlin, and T. W. Talley have made excellent collections of the Negro songs. With these earlier books before them, and with abundant pencils and notebooks, and with automobiles, no doubt, to visit far-flung settlements, the four newest compilers have more nearly approached inclusiveness. But complete inclusiveness is, of course, impossible; works of this sort must necessarily reject the large Rabelaisian element found in all folk-songs. Mr. Johnson, in his book of Spirituals, makes the sound point that the Negro's concept of music is rhythm, not melody, a fact that Havelock Ellis and Sherwood Anderson have emphasized under the cloth of essay and fiction. The inherent rhythm of the race cannot escape the person who sees Negroes at work and at church. Every task from the simplest to the relatively complex they perform to the accompaniment of singing that is just as often mournful as joyous. At church they sway back and forth to the rhythm of incomprehensible chants of mournful cadence. The secular songs-work songs, railroad songs, blues, dance songs-all depend upon rhythm alone, and when melody does creep in, it is in the form of the famous and popular "barber-shop chord." The Negro songs, whether religious or secular, abound in fantastic pictures of Heaven and Hell, Jehovah and Jesus and Satan. Dr. Odum records songs picturing Christ in the various roles of fire-eater, train conductor, chariot driver, river pilot, divine healer, hurler of thunderbolts, building foreman, and "mourner." Satan is ever on the alert to anatch away gamblers, liars, drunkards, hypocrites, "ho'-mongers," dancers, and all other sinners. God is even more terrible than the God of Hebrew theology, but he is, nevertheless, always on the side of sister, mother, father, brother, "mourner," preacher, and master, and He sees to it that no person, not even the notorious "bad man" of every community, dies unredeemed. Angels, Sunday mornings, deep rivers, universal fires, and the imminent judgment bar play a great part in the imagery of all these songs. Sheer bravado, heart-breaking loneliness, pistols, policemen, traveling shoes, cocaine, gambling, whiskey, love, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, New Orleans, railroads, and many other equally poetic subjects, when combined by Negro singers, offer a humor that is unconscious and irresistible. These songs are of great social significance and, not infrequently, carry economic significance as well. The song is quite true which gives this combination of tragedy and comedy: Nigger an' a white man Nigger win de money But skeered to pick it up. And there are others. Through them is gained an intimate knowledge which the Negro, in his recognized dual personality, strives to prevent by an ingenuousness that is baffling. The blustering "bad man" would no more put this song into stark prose: I come from sweet ol' Alabam' An' I don' give a damn. than he would translate the "sebm-up" game into terms of political economy and shout the translation from a soapbox on the street corner. The poetry of the great body of these songs can, of course, be endured only for its naivete. The regular line is the exception, and two successive lines of identical metre are most rare. The tendency is to make the lines rhyme; and the sense suffers. The following example is taken from Dr. Odum's book: Ain't it a pity, ain't it a shame? Keep er-inchin' erlong, keep er-inchin' erlong, The chief beauty both of words and music, however, is found in the Spirituals. "Steal Away to Jesus," "Go Down Moses," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," "Singin' Wid a Sword in Ma Han" are typical examples. The origin of the Negro songs has |