rom
his early attachment to the concrete; in the rush of words,
especially verbs; in the concatenation of objects, the flow of things
'en masse' through his verse, still with the impulse of "the bright speed"
he had at the source; in his theatrical impersonation of abstractions,
as in "The Funeral of Youth", where for once the abstract and the concrete
are happily fused; -- in all these there are the elements, and in the last
there is the perfection, of mastery. For one thing, he knew how to end.
It is with him a dramatic secret. The brief stroke does this work
time and time again in his verse, nowhere better than in
"at dead YOUTH's funeral:" all were there, --

"All, except only LOVE -- LOVE had died long ago."

The poem is like a vision of an old time MASQUE: --

"The sweet lad RHYME" ----
"ARDOUR, the sunlight on his greying hair" ----
"BEAUTY . . . pale in her black; dry-eyed, she stood alone."

How vivid! The lines owe something to his eye for costume, for staging;
but, as mere picture writing, it is as firm as if carved on an obelisk.
And as he reconciled concrete and abstract here, so he had left
his short breath, in those earlier lines, behind, and had come into
the long sweep and open water of great style: --

"And light on waving grass, he knows not when,
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell."

Or; --

"And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes,"

Or, more briefly, --

"In wise majestic melancholy train."

And this, --

"And evening hush broken by homing wings,"

Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner
of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled
contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling
of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways
he was conspicuously successful in his art.

The first of these -- they are all in the larger forms of art --
is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely
a sonnet in dialogue or advancing by simple contrast;
but one in which there may be these things, but also there is
a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to consider it too curiously,
take "The Hill". This sonnet is beautiful in action and diction;
its eloquence speeds it on with a lift; the situation is
the very crest of life; then, --

"We shall go down with unreluctant tread,
Rose-crowned into the darkness! . . .