Verses Instinct with Melody Such as Few Poets Can Put into Words In the poetry of Conrad Aiken we are reached by the melody that few poets can create with words, remembering at the same time that line of Keats, Heard Imelodies are sweet, but those ' unheard are sweeter." There is that unheard but haunting music in the lines of this new American Poet:
And then truth came; he seemed to rise Released at last through quiet skies, Through silver airs of heaven whereon Hung gentiest music of a dawn, And all that music seemed to be 'A praise of being high and free, Of coming joy and going sorrow, Of going night and coming morrow. i In these lines from "Earth Triumphant" there is the quality that lifts one to a finer hope, not only by the melody, but by the thought expressed.
Much of the pleasure from his verse lies in the delicate description, showing now the perfect beauty of detail and again the glory of vast spaces: "the deep fields, valley, shining hills, clover and sun-flash on high mountain ills'; the night song of the brook, "soft as a dream, gray as the woof of sleep'; the cool, silver rain, and "the first slow snowflakes leaving a sprinkled whiteness on leaves and grass"; "the loving storm and loving wind."
Aiken's~ philosophy is elusive. We think we have found it in "Earth 'Triumphant,' but our caught and labelled theme is contradicted again and again in "The Jig of Forslin," till we are driven to his own lines in the poem, "Sophistication," on the youth who "Joved philosophy and learned its sad satiety"
He found his caught stars would not shine, Caught sun and earth had ceased their song.
Conrad Aiken must be read in the whole, like Whitman, A part may mean nothing. One, must follow from "Earth Triumphant" and the "Nocturne of Remembered Spring" to the "Jig of Forslin," "The Charmed Rose' and other poems. Notice his peace and his quiet coolness, At the end of "Dust in Starlight,' where two people are reunited, he surely tells us his own sincere belief of joy: To these once more was starlight given, They walked on earth and thought in heaven.
Thus dust starlight had its dream. Thinking to hold to some faint beam Of far-off, higher, holier things, Bo borne from dust by dream of wings.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.