picture, I have only to move my lips, even only to repeat
the lines inwardly, in silence, and the poem is mine again.

But I have just been reading the latest Imagist anthology, especially
the _Lacquer Prints_ by Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly ten
minutes ago--and I cannot repeat one of them. I could learn them, of
course, by an effort. But that is not the way man desires to remember
music and poetry. It must come singing into his head and heart--and
remain there without his effort. Here is a "Lacquer Print" called
_Sunshine_. It is indeed vivid, though (quite properly, of course) a
little garden pool to Tennyson's vast ocean.

The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises.
If I throw a stone into the placid water
It suddenly stiffens
Into rings and rings
Of sharp gold wire.

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection of
epithet, here is no "poetic" diction of the despised sort. But
something is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it does
not ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourself
repeating it days and months later. Close the book--and the poem
perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.

It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in the
new verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's
poem, _The Return_:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the pace
of these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired,
but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem by
anybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she could
repeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off the
immortal nonsense, beginning, "She went into the garden patch to get a
cabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up the
road thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so
he died--" and the woman was floored. Such a poem as _The Return_
would have floored her quite as completely. I find, after reading
carefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound in _The New
Poetry Anthology_, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe,
than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat just one
line--or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasing