Comrades true, born anew, peace to you!

Your souls shall be where the heroes are
And your memory shine like the morning-star.
Brave and dear,

Shield us here.

Farewell!"

Joyce Kilmer

LOVE IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY

For thousands of generations men have loved women and women have loved men. Through love they have known emotions of innumerable tones and flavors and colors. They have shared the rapture of the morning stars singing together and they have tasted the bitter waters of Marah. Poets have made this rapture and this bitterness communicable by singing with powerful emotional honesty the thing that was in their hearts.

To-day, as in the past, poets are stirred by thoughts of love and of the old, primal things of the race. They write many poems about these things. But it is more difficult to find a good poem of love than to find any other kind of a good poem. It is not that the lyrics of love are badly written. They have charm and grace. But they lack something that would make them great; perhaps faith and dignity. Perhaps they are not quite strong enough, true enough, fresh enough.

It may be that the reason for this is to be found in the kind of men and women we moderns are. We are pleasant and charming. We are seldom great. And to write a great poem of love a person must have had the capacity for loving as the great love and also the capacity for expressing himself. He may have missed his fulfillment. He may have been thwarted in his development. Life may have been hurt for him by some one else. He may have lived far, far below his best level of achievement. But the man who writes great love poetry must have had, at one time or another in his life, a latent greatness of personality. For better than anything else love poetry reveals a person's "might-have-been."

We have in contemporary literature, as has been said, a great many poems of love. Most of them fall into either one of two groups, a group of poems of untrammeled naturalism and a group of poems gracefully conventional. Outside of these two groups are a few very beautiful lyrics.

The naturalistic love poems, it should suffice to say, are poems that glorify the fleeting passions and write a question mark after the story of Baucis and Philemon. They are sophisticated poems, very far indeed from the strong sanity of the folk. They are pessimistic poems, written as if their makers were a little bit afraid of loving any one person long enough to let it become a habit. The ideal of a growth in love and of a love fostered through the years seems to be alien to the philosophy of the poets who give us these naturalistic lyrics. To them, love and life are forever experimental.

The makers of the graceful lyrics, on the other hand, all too often see love through the eyes of their dead forefathers, and make of it simply a convention for literary uses. In their songs love is a theme, like the subject of a child's composition. They spin about it their inconsequent gossamers of literary fancy. To speak one word of light and fire seems to be beyond their power and beyond their desire.

The more poems of love we read, the more we are likely to return mentally to the line from Rupert Brooke's sonnet, "Peace." in which he speaks of

"their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love."

Certainly we have few poems of love by contemporary poets that will bear comparison with the lyrics of love made by our predecessors on this continent, the American Indians, and collected in translation and included in a book edited by George W. Cronyn, called "The Path on The Rainbow." These poems are simple and passionate, clean and strong, just what love songs should be. The lines of the Ojibwa poem, "Calling-One's-Own," are resonant with the spirit of a great poet.

"Awake! flower of the forest, sky-treading bird of the prairie. Awake! awake! wonderful fawn-eyed one.

When you look upon me I am satisfied; as flowers that drink dew. The breath of your mouth is the fragrance of flowers in the morning, Your breath is their fragrance at evening in the moon-of-fading-leaf."

In such poems we find no tiresome self-analysis, no grossness, no mental sickness. Here is song as fresh and innocent as the fragrance of flowers in the "moon-of-fading-leaf.”

One of the finest groups of love poems written in recent years is the "Sonnets of A Portrait Painter," by Arthur Davison Ficke. A few of them have the fault of being somewhat literary in diction, but most of them are intensely human and written with great fluency, charm, and naturalness of rhythm. Sometimes a pause in just the right place gives to a line the very quality and accent of a lover's speech. And to have accomplished that in the old, old pattern of the sonnet, is to have achieved an unexpected miracle. Such lines are these, taken from one of the most beautiful sonnets, which begins, "I am in love with high, far-seeing places."

"You who look on me with grave eyes where rapture

And April love of living burn confessed

The gods are good! the world lies free to capture!

Life has no walls. Oh, take me to your breast!
Take me be with me for a moment's span!

I am in love with all unveiled faces.

I seek the wonder at the heart of man;

I would go up to the far-seeing places."

Another, the tenth, begins with all the wistful and wilful immediacy of love

"Come forth: for Spring is singing in the boughs

Of every white and tremulous apple-tree.

This is the season of eternal vows;

But what are vows that they should solace me?"

Everybody who wishes to know the best lyrics of love written in recent years should read, among other things, some of these

sonnets.

Of the tragic poetry of love we have little in the poetry of to-day. It is the modern fashion to be perennially and persistently cheerful, and sometimes one is tempted to think that

that peculiar child Polyanna has been preaching the "glad game" to the poets. At any rate, we can find in contemporary literature few poems to compare, either in sadness or in beauty, with Lyric XIV from "A Shropshire Lad" by A. E. Housman. The bitterness of love denied is sharply felt in this poem, and felt just as it is felt in life. The unhappy lover sees the "careless people" who "call their souls their own" coming and going in the world about him. His sorrow sets him apart from them, in his own mind. His misery is, for him, unique. It makes the world seem frivolous. That is the psychology of it. This masterly little poem in five stanzas closes with these lines:

"There flowers no balm to sain him

From east of earth to west

That's lost for everlasting

The heart out of his breast.

"Here by the labouring highway
With empty hands I stroll:
Sea-deep, till doomsday morning,
Lie lost my heart and soul."

Mr. Housman has spoken the almost unutterable sense of loss that oppresses all young lovers who have loved greatly and are bereft of love.

Other men have written good poems of love, sometimes quite a number of them, sometimes only a few. Bliss Carman has. G. K. Chesterton has. But surely it is fair to say that no one man stands head and shoulders above his fellows, to-day, as a poet of the love of man for woman.

Much better things can be said of the women who are singing songs of the love of woman for man. The love songs of modern women are more virile and beautiful-if one may say that of woman's work of expression-than the love songs of men. This is probably because women are learning to use their own voices and sing their own songs now almost for the first time in AngloSaxon history. No matter how talkative they may have been in private life, in public women used to keep silence. And until