



Produced by Alan Light





MEN, WOMEN AND GHOSTS

by Amy Lowell


by Amy Lowell [American (Massachusetts) poet and critic--1874-1925.]


[Note on text:  Lines longer than 78 characters are broken
and the continuation is indented two spaces.  Some obvious errors
have been corrected.]



  "'... 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
Garden", he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give the
circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up and
down, elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock.

From these experiments, it is but a step to the flowing rhythm of music.
In "The Cremona Violin", I have tried to give this flowing, changing
rhythm to the parts in which the violin is being played.  The effect is
farther heightened, because the rest of the poem is written in the seven
line Chaucerian stanza; and, by deserting this ordered pattern for the
undulating line of vers libre, I hoped to produce something of the
suave, continuous tone of a violin.  Again, in the violin parts
themselves, the movement constantly changes, as will be quite plain to
any one reading these passages aloud.

In "The Cremona Violin", however, the rhythms are fairly obvious and
regular. I set myself a far harder task in trying to transcribe the
various movements of Stravinsky's "Three Pieces 'Grotesques', for String
Quartet". Several musicians, who have seen the poem, think the movement
accurately given.

These experiments lead me to believe that there is here much food for
thought and matter for study, and I hope many poets will follow me in
opening up the still hardly explored possibilities of vers libre.

A good many of the poems in this book are written in "polyphonic prose".
A form about which I have written and spoken so much that it seems
hardly necessary to explain it here.  Let me hastily add, however, that
the word "prose" in its name refers only to the typographical
arrangement, for in no sense is this a prose form. Only read it aloud,
Gentle Reader, I beg, and you will see what you will see. For a purely
dramatic form, I know none better in the whole range of poetry. It
enables the poet to give his characters the vivid, real effect they have
in a play, while at the same time writing in the 'decor'.

One last innovation I have still to mention.  It will be found in
"Spring Day", and more fully enlarged upon in the series, "Towns in
Colour".  In these poems, I have endeavoured to give the colour, and
light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing the purely
pictorial effect, and with little or