PQ 8179 S5 Z728 1921 MAIN UC-NRLF B M QS3 SS7 NOTEfe RAPHS 1 V CITIZEN OF [HE TWILIGHT IKELEY LIBRARIE! 1 sat .mtM'nmtfrvw' Bryn Mawr Notes AND Monographs IV A CITIZEN OF THE TWILIGHT BRYN MAWR NOTES AND MONOGRAPHS IV A CITIZEN OF THE TWILIGHT • • • •, • • • • • • • • • • .... .,•. ... • ••• •• •• • • • • • i • •• • • • J I » > A CITIZEN OF THE TWILIGHT JOSE ASUNCION SILVA By GEORGIANA GODDARD KING, M.A. Professor of the History of Art in Bryn Mawr College Member of the Hispanic Society of America BRYN MAWR COLLEGE Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania LONGMANS. GREEN AND CO. Xew York, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras 1921 Copyright, 1921, by BRYN MAWR COLLEGE JOSfi A. vSILVA I A CITIZEN OF THE TWILIGHT ''Bogota is a city of the Andes, 8000 feet above the sea. There the atmosphere is cold and dry. The air is dehcate: the sky is of disconcerting purity and transparency. Forty or fifty miles away the profile of the mountains stands out brilliant and ghtter- ing, as in ombres chinois. Under this Hght, colour becomes provisional: soft tones be- come sharp, keen tones become half-tones. Neither black nor white can resist the light; the black takes a greenish tinge im- mediately, the white is spoiled by shades of grey. In this dry and rarefied air," con- tinued Silva, "always at the same tem- perature, the nerves are in constant ten- sion.'*/ Here is neither summer nor winter, but always chill and sun, or drizzling mist and dragging skirts of cloud: there are no long nights of winter, no long summer days, for night and day are alike the year around; and always it is either day or night, for there is no twilight in the courts of the sun. To the rest of the world it would seem life No twilight n. a / /V B R Y N M A W R NOTES in the courts of the sun IV ' \ l ) 1 ' » I -* !— »4-^- Tension Culture IV A CITIZEN OF there must be in itself abnormal, exacting, troubled. For the poet who gave this ac- count of his own land, the tension of the nerves was torture, and in the end they snapped. Silva was a citizen of the twiHght. There are many sorts of pessimism, and not all pessimists have haunted the City of Dreadful Night. This younger brother of Leopardi and James Thomson is deter- mined by his temperament toward a sort of twilight land, a land of shadows and voices, vague forms that pass, shades that elude the grasp, fluttering moths and fleeting echoes, where the dark is but dim- ness, the nights are full of murmurings, perfumes and music of wings. Jose Asuncion Silva was born on the 27th of October, in 1865; and at the age of thirty- 'he shot himself: on May 24th, 1896. His father, D. Ricardo Silva, was a cultivated man, whose friends were poets and savants, journalists, orators, or else connoisseurs of literature. Jorge Isaacs was a familiar of the house. The literary atmosphere of Bogota, as recalled by those BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT who breathed it, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, suggests that of Edin- burgh in the first. Don Ricardo himself wrote little essays of which his club thought well. He was a man of taste, and appar- ently of heart: his son was to mourn him. Brought up in the best society of Bogota, educated like other gentlemen's sons, now at one school and now at another, and at last quitting school definitively because of his interest in books, Jose w^ent to France on a journey with his father which had business as its excuse but resulted in a swifter and richer maturing of his genius than if he had been sent there to study. To Paris in those days all South America, like Italy, like England, looked for ideals of art, for idols in letters, for the wind of in- spiration, whereby the Muse became a P3rthoness. He made the acquaintance and felt the^^power of Jean Richepin, but the strongest influence upon his style was less any one man's than, rather, that of a school, the Symholiste. He came home not so much changed as formed. He will have been what old women call AND MONOGRAPHS and travel IV A gentle child A CITIZEN OF A good son and brother a nursery child; not unkind to tlie dolls, or alien to his little sister's pleasure at bringing in a cocoon and laying it up to wait for the butterfly; content with the fairy-tale and the singing-game, satisfied with books, hushed and exalted by the First Commuaiaji»r Certain poems are steeped in the atmo^^ere of a sheltered life at home, the warm sweetness and safety of the nursery, the lamp-light, the drawn cur- tain, and the far-off sounds from the street. » He was about twenty-three when Don Ricardo died, leaving his affairs in a sad state, and Jose as eldest son took up the business in the hope of paying off the debts. His mother's beauty and brilliancy and worldly gifts, the rare loveliness and charm of his sister Elvira, the Httle ones, still in the nursery, for the three brothers in between had died in infancy — all these were but so many irresistible demands upon him, constituted rights for so many help- less people. Thenceforth he looked on his literary preoccupations as a sort of criminal vice, to be hidden from all but his friends. IV BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT In this episode of the business and its matter of course, appears a trait entirely American, setting him off from others of his temperament whose tragical lives were determined by their troubled spirits, Leopardi and James Thomson. Only in our hemisphere may a man combine the functions of a shopkeeper and a gentleman. Leopardi was a man of rank, and though he was much put to it at times for means of subsistence, he could earn none except by teaching or writing; Thomson was bom in the lower middle class and could not be admitted to the conversation or personal consideration of what are technically called gentlemen; but Silva. like his father, moved among the best people, in a capital, while dealing in dry goods and notions. "Out of the necessities of his trade he drew material for romance, and the list of his importations reads like what came to Solo- mon in the ships of Hiram king of Tyre: silks from Jirganor, jars from China, Murano glass, Atkinson's perfumes, and Lalique jew^ellery. His poems meanwhile were handed A shop- keeper AND MONOGRAPHS IV A poet Personal charm IV A CITIZEN OF about in manuscript, copied, recopied, and miscopied; learned by heart, recited, and repeated, as fast as written, in the literary clubs of Bogota. Some came out in news- papers and provincial Illustrated Weeklies, some were never published and were re- constructed after his death from scraps of paper and half-forgotten recollections in the memory of his intimates. Like Tennyson, Silva himself could re- member and recite what he had composed: his voice was fine with rare beauty of timbre, his cadences were rich and well adapted, the magic of his poetry was ex- traordinary. He had, moreover, great personal charm, with the especial friendly and gentle grace which is confined usually to those who have been delicate as chil- dren, or for some reason have needed more care and caressing than most — the indis- position to hurt anything alive. Personal beauty as marked as Byron's but graver, appears in his portrait and in reminiscence of him. The great pale brow, the great chestnut beard, the great luminous eyes, are all romantic and maladif. He was ex- BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT pressly fashioned, as his friend Sanin Cano was to say, for an exquisite instrument of suffering. The sister nearest to his own age seems to have suppHed in these years what he most craved, the complete under- standing, the intimacy, in a certain sense the protection, rarely to be found except within the bounds of kindred. Some other experience he had at this time of what the name of love also includes: "a sordid busi- ness in which he became, against his will, the central figure. " but which left him im- spoiled. The handful of poems that are called GotasAmargas, Bitter Drops, which were the outcome chiefly of the experience, he would never consent to print, but indeed they contain nothing that he needed to regret, except youth. Grossness is not there, coarseness is rare, and, like a boy's smoking, studied rather than instinctive. Throughout his short time of working, the verses upon sentimental themes are aloof, ironic, and indifferent. It would almost appear that the only love he knows in a strength which can be called passion, is The hearth AND MONOGRAPHS IV 8 Fin de siicle IV A CITIZEN OF that of kindred: mother and daughter, brother and sister, betrothed or wedded lovers. The sanctity of the hearth is over all. Even in the Gotas A mar gas the sa- tirical impulse very soon yields to the mere malady of living; his Lazarus, who when the Saviour raised him had wept for joy, four months later was found in the place of tombs, weeping alone and envying the dead. The malady of the century's end was his. "When you come at your last hour, to your last lodging," so he concludes a long- ish piece, finely chiselled, called Philos- ophies, "you will feel the killing anguish of having done nothing." ' 'It would be a mistake, however, to diagnose this disease as the same with Leopardi's; it is not the futility of accomplishment which besets him, but the impossibility. As his doctor pronounces in El Mai de Siglo, *'What ails you is hunger" — the famished need for all that is out of reach and then, furthermore, for all that the constitution of this par- ticular world denies. "Sacrifice yourself to art, combine, refine, carve, toil on. BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT strive, and into the labour that is kiUing you — canvas, bronze or poem — put your essence, your nerves, your whole soul. Terrible vain emprize! The day after to- morrow your work will be out of fashion." The trouble here lies not in the nature of things but in the perversity of life. What ailed him was hunger. Like other young men of parts, ardent and ambitious, he was dazzled and dizzied by the un- guessed possibilities of the universe. The immense spectacle of human knowledge, of modern science, of speculative thought, burst upon him; and for him as for how many, Herbert Spencer's First Principles was like the draught of Lucretius. As they overpassed the flaming ramparts of the world, as they watched the atoms drop- ping through the void and saw the stars whirling through infinitude, as they felt the enormous cosmical process knit up into worlds and dissolve again through recur- rent eternities, the burning concepts scorched the brain, the swelling appre- hensions with which it ached "made havoc among those tender cells." Like his The cosmic spectacle AND MONOGRAPHS IV 10 Sudden death IV A CITIZEN OF friends, who, what with books and what with talk, had come to this new Ught, had shared with him this all but intolerable initiation, he had to unlearn old notions and acquire new ones. Others took it lightlier. In their study, as one of them says, they gained, in default of other knightly discipline, a diversion and a noble aim. He plunged into Herbert Spencer and foimd, or fancied, that he must learn mechanics, natural history, chemistry, ethnography and the exact sciences. What for his companions was an orgy of acquisi- tion, was tortiire for him; Business pressed him, his family claimed him, and society, and life. Misfortune was to come again: suddenly, in a January night, his sister died of a malady of the heart. When she was dressed for the grave, he covered her body with lilies and roses, drenching it with per- fume, and turned every one else out of the room except a single friend. As he stayed there long in silence, in the very profound of grief he found his anodyne. Then he was for a time Secretary of BRYN MAWR NOTES <^, THE TWILIGHT 11 Legation at Caracas. Returning thence he was wrecked in the Amerique, off the coast, and lost a set of sonnets that he was used to speak of as my jewels. For nearly ten years, now, he had borne the distress that mere living involved, the pressure of cruel care, and a more cruel spiritual dry- ness. He wrote once to a lady: ''Counselled in these hours of spiritual aridity by my lay confessor, an old psy- chologist, who keeps in his cell for sole ornament a copy of Albert Diirer's Melan- cholia, and who knows to the bottom the subtle secrets of the director of souls, I have attained to great consolations, and re-established inward peace by reading and meditating much those verses, the sweetest of the Imitation: Excedunt enim spirituales consola- tiones omnis mundi delicias, et carnis voluptates. Nam omnes deliciae mundanae aut vanae sunt aut turpes^ The temper of the Preacher is not the temper of thirty years. Immediate anx- Spiritual dryness AND MONOGRAPHS IV 12 The cares of this world A CITIZEN OF ieties beset him. In 1885 the six months of civil war, the isolation of the capital and the dependence on paper money had brought about a financial crisis that ruined his father; another recurred in 1894. From one day to the next he could not be sure of a friend to whom he might turn. A series of short stories, written before this, had been lost in the Amerique, irretriev- ably as it proved. He had not the oppor- tunity or the long constancy of purpose necessary to replace these: he used, how- ever, some of the material in the draught of a novel, never to be finished, called De Sobremesa. The fragment on madness and suicide in which some have thought to foresee his ending, was not in the least autobiographical; it belongs to this T able- Talk, and was evoked by the news of Maupassant's insanity. He spoke often, indeed, of death, and of self-destruction, quoting Maurice Barres' saying, "They kill themselves for lack of imagination." He said, himself: "A man dies of suicide as of typhus, both are infec- tious." For insanity was not rare in the IV BRYN MAWR NOTES D//unfo<> THE TWILIGHT thin air and cold of Bogota, and to say that a neighbour was mad, a famiUar recourse of slanderous and social malice. The place seems, indeed, in certain as- pects, melancholy enough, grey, chill, and foggy as Bruges, while, as in the Dia de Dafuntos, the mist falls drop by drop, en- wrapping the dark city, and the grieving bells speak to the Hving of the dead. The mood is found concentrated in Triste, of which the substance is somewhat as follows : When fate, whenever it likes, mingles with our lives the pains, afore-time un- gues sed, of absence and death. And, wrapped in mystery, with startling speed depart, friends to the burial ground, illusions into the dark. Tenderness' poignant voice, that throbs as through the dark of night a distant bell, Brings up lost memories that waken occult sounds amid the ruin of years: And with short swallow-flights, through the dark, come dreams of pain and cold, Till some far-of, consoling thought com- mences with our distress the great con- fused dialogue of the tombs and the skies. AND MONOGRAPHS 13 Triste IV 14 A dialogue of the tomb and the sky An inno- vator IV A CITIZEN OF The dialogue was ringing in his ears. Yet it would have taken no more than a little good luck, a little sun, to avert the end. In the spring of 1896 he was sick with pain and anon it was mortal; he was tossing on what the Prayer-Book calls the waves of this troublesome world, and sud- denly the deep waters went over his soul. He said of himself: "An intellectual cul- ture, undertaken without method and with insane pretensions to universality, an in- tellectual culture which has ended in the lack of all faith, in the scorn of every hu- man limitation, in an ardent curiosity of evil, in desire to try all possible experience of life — all this has completed the work of the other influences" and he has become a mere mechanism of pain. Little as he left, Silva is still, perhaps, the most entirely poet of any Hispano- American. The verse of Ruben Dario, be- side his, is like a Japanese print beside a mediaeval illumination, it seems flimsy, facile and colourless. The progress, throughout those few poor years which are allowed him, in perfection even, is less than BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT 15 in intellectual content, and it breaks off at the mere first-fruits. He begins with the Lied, masters the A lexandrine, and ends in sustained and powerful vers lihre. In poetry he was an innovator, not solely in the choice of themes, the intimacy and charm of interiors, the nursery lore so deHcately touched, in the preoccupation with death, in the sense for the voice of things; nor yet was his pecuhar excellence chiefly in his feeUng, exquisite and in- stinctive, for half-tones and half-Hghts. In his verse he was even more modem, enlarging and enriching the rigid classical possibilities and the vague romantic con- ventionalities of the forms which he in- herited. He was not, indeed, like our best poets at this moment, an imagist quite, but he was a symbolist: and the texture and cadence of his poetry as the sound con- veys it or the inward ear apprehends it, has the same value as the names of things, and more value than the descriptive epi- thet. For that reason every translation is foredoomed to displease the translator first in themes feeling AND MONOGRAPHS and verse Symbolist IV 16 Timbre and overtones The Old Things IV A CITIZEN OF of all. But even without the sonorous and magical harmonies, so much remains, by virtue precisely of his symbolic use of language, and power to evoke mysterious and distant reverberations in the soul, in the employment of words like old and shadow, death and dreams, the sounding of bells, the echoing of voices. With the majestic line iO voces silenciosii^ de los muertos! he opens a translation, that rather betters the original, of Tennyson's When the Dumb Hour Clothed in Black. Each poem has a formal and living beauty of its own, whether spoken or seen, like that one which he copied out on parchment with illu- minations (as Peter Cristus once copied a leaf of miniature from Bruges into the background of a portrait), for one who though no poet was a lover of all beauty and a chosen friend of poets. Vjej eces, that transcript was called, The Ola Things: the title of the poem is the very same that, in the middle nineties, Mr. James tried for a novel, and gave up re- BRYN MAWR NOTES ^ \eJ£C£ J THE TWILIGHT luctantly. The dimmed lights, the hushed fragrances, the faded tones, the dust on musical instruments, evoke the very strik- ing of that luxurious and long-past hour. Taller Moderno might be the identical studio, with its Tiepolo in the distant ceil- ing, of Mr. James's contemporaneous tale of Collaboration. The rusty gold, the long dim evenings, and dusky hours on winter afternoons, were grateful to the dying cen- tury, were soothing to sick nerves. Mid- night Dreams, the English phrase, affords the title for another very characteristic piece, of which it is hard to remember, in the completeness of the picture, the slow movement, the charged atmosphere, that it contains but two more lines than a sonnet. Tonight, being half asleep and solitary, My dreams of other times appeared to me; The dreams of hopes, glories and raptures fine, And happinesses that were never mine. So they drew near in slow procession Peopling the corners of the dark room soon; There was grave silence then in all the place. And the clock stayed its pendulum a space. 17 AND M ONOGRAPHS Contem- porary, American, akin in feeling IV 18 Overtones IV A CITIZEN OF The sweetness vague of a forgot perfume Spoke of the past like a ghost come V the room, Faces I saw the grave has long since gotten, Voices I heardf where once heard I have forgotten The dreams drew near, and saw that I was sleeping, Then they withdrew, absolute silence keeping, And, touching not the pillow's silken braid, Dissolved and drifted off into the shade. With a different range of subjects and images, Silva yet recalls Verlaine in his in- fallible ear for overtones, both musical and emotional. His instrument is the viole d'amore, which is strung with a second set of silver strings beneath, never struck, that yet sound to the voice of things. It will recall to English-speaking readers the English poetry of his contemporaries, the soft-dropping cadences of Arthur Symons, the metrical strangeness and beauty of Lionel Johnson, the luxurious polyphony of Ernest Dowson. BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT 19 The influence of Heine, which he felt only on the lyrical and ironic side, was both superficial and transient, but it possibly affected the quatrains and the sentiment of some early pieces, like Laughter and Tears. Together we laughed one day, Aye, and we laughed so long That all the laughter was jey And turned to weeping strong. Together at eventide We wept, we wept so long That we kept, when tears were dried, A mysterious song. Deep sighs rise from the feast Between hot cup and cup. And in salt water of seas Pale pearls grow up. On the next page, however, the measure begins to complicate and turn upon itself, with the syncopated rhythms of the short lines, in the piece called Fixed Stars, and the ritardando at the end of each verse: Heine AND MONOGRAPHS IV 20 Byron IV A CITIZEN OF When I have done With life, body and soul, And sleep in the grave The longest night of the whole, Remembering of things The endless bewildering maze. My eyes shall keep, like a dream. The mild light of your gaze. As they rot and rot Down in the dark grave's room, They will know, in deatWs unknown, Your eyes that hang in the gloom. The culmination of this period is the poem Resurrections, which is still preoccu- pied with the horrors of mortaHty. The escape is provided, however, for the imagination, and though not precisely reminiscent now, the piece yet remains still in the same mood with Leopardi. Like nature'' s self Cradle and grave eternal of all things, The soul has occult powers, Silences, lights, musics and shadoivings. B R Y N M A W R NOTES THE TWILIGHT 21 Over an essence eterne Unstable passings-by of forms that shrink: And unknown breasts Where life and death utterly interlink. Dank leaves are born Where in a grave have rotted body and bone; And adorations new On altars from the broken altar-stone. With this disappears, except for satiric use, the Lied. Longer measures are wanted, and more various, and above all more variable. The sonnet is treated sometimes like a short ode, as though the fourteen lines were accidental, like the length of a crystal of amethyst, the shape and the colour being the main concern. ''Verse is a holy cup," he wrote once, ''put there a pure thought only." The long and short lines alternate within a single poem in the stanza structure, as in the adorable Maderos de S. Juan, which is a sort of gavotte composed on the theme of a folk-song or nursery game. Lastly, the and Leopardi AND MONOGRAPHS IV 22 The Poem IV A CITIZEN OF stanza disappears, lines drag out or dwindle at will, the music changes to keep step with the dancers dancing in tune. He never, however, quite abandoned the long splendid couplet, which is flexible as chain mail, that Chapman and Morris both could wear, yet in which they fell short always of the supreme perfection. His finest ex- ample of the measure describes how a poem is made. 7 thought once with new art a poem to fashion, Nervous and novel, daring, full of passion. Dallying awhile betwixt grotesque and tragic I called up all the rhythms by runes of magic. Indocile rhythms drew nearer in the room, Flying and seeking each other in the gloom, Sonorous rhythms, grave rhythms and strong, Some like a shock of arms, some like birds^ song. From orient unto west, from south to north. Of metres and of forms the host came forth: Under frail bridles champing bits of gold Crossed and recrossed the tercets manifold; BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT 23 Wide passage through the throng then opening In gold and purple came the Sonnet, King, Until all sang . . . And in the merry din. My fancy caught by coquetry therein, One sharp stanza stirred me, threw a spell With the clear shrilling of a little hell. This of them all I chose: for wedding gear Gave it rich rhythms, silvery and crystal clear. I told therein — shunning the mean — a tale Tragical, subtle, and fantastical: 'Twas the sad story, candid, undenied, Of a fair woman, well beloved, who died, And, for the bitterness to taste in this, I joined sweet syllables savouring like a kiss, Broidered phrases with gold, drew music strange Like lutes and mandolins that interchange; Left in vague light the distances profound, Filled with damp mist; shed melancholy around: {As swift masques at a fete, to music dancing. Cross and recross against dark backgrounds glancing. of a loved woman AND MONOGRAPHS IV 24 A CITIZEN OF The critic uncompre- hending Shrouded in words that hide them like a veil, Masked in black velvet or in satin pale) — Set, behind all, and stirred, vague impli- cations, Mystical sentiments, human temptations. I saw that it was good with artist's pride, Scented with heliotrope, amethyst-dyed, Last showed my Poem to a critic bland: He read it thrice, said, ''I don't under- stand ^ The verse of Silva is reckoned as vers libre, but his liberty consists not so much in defiance of the measure as in subtihzing within the measure, as in the famous line which broke like a tidal wave over Castilian verse — Ritmos sonoros, ritmos potentos, ritmos graves. While, then, his place is recognized as with the vers-librists of his age in France, it must be recalled that though French verse, with its strict syllabic structure, its fixed cesura, its alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, was in sore need IV BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT 25 of liberation, yet Spanish verse had always something nearer the flexibility of English, and, with its rapid and noble movement, its frequent elision and entire indifference to hiatus, with its recognition of asson- ance as not only lawful but often an ad- ditional grace, it had therefore no need of violence in disintegration. The great Nocturne ^ which must be so named because the author wrote three others, one at least of which is pregnant with splendid and troubling beauty, was published in a provincial weekly and was taken as a huge joke by most people. It was learned by heart and quoted in com- pany for laughter. Yet it was really, as rhythm, in the direct tradition of Spanish verse, the only novelty being that for good reasons of his own the author counted as a single line two or three short ones. The repetition of Hnes, which seemed mon- strous in its day, is now a commonplace, an easy resource suggested by folk-poetry and dance-song, as in the compositions for instance of Mr. Vatchell Lindsay. The general determination of the verse is Spanish verse AND MONOGRAPHS The direct » tradition IV 26 Nocturne IV A CITIZEN OF toward a four-syllable foot, disused indeed since the Greek and Latin, but quite re- coverable if two trochees are run together by lightening the stress on every syllable but the third. Now trochaic measures, like dactyllic, are alien to English speech, as Swinburne in a famous passage pointed out, and the following translation is hampered, in. addition to other disabilities, by the stubborn tendency of English ac- centual verse to reverse the accent and im- pose anapaestic rhythms, or a jumble of broken iambs, sooner than recognize the tramp of the marching trochees. The writer despairs of conveying to any ex- cepting those who know the poem already, the fragrant and phosphorescent splendours of the original. On a night — Night all filled with murmurings and perfumes, music, wings, — On a night When there burned in nuptial glooms and damps the fireflies^ lamps, Slow beside me, hanging on me, silent, pale, BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT 27 — Say, did foretastes, infinite in bitter- nesses, Shrivel you in the secret' st centre of your fibres? — Down the blossomy path that led across the plain, You proceeded: White the moonlight, Through the azure skies, infinite and pro- found, scattered around; And your shadow Fine and languid. With my shadow Thrown together by the moonlight On the dreary gravel Of the path, confounded, Made but one. Made but one. Made but one sole shadow slowly drag- ging. They were one sole shadow slowly drag- ging, One sole shadow slowly dragging. Now, at night Alone, my spirit Brimmed with the infinite bitterness and agony of your death. Two shadows AND MONOGRAPHS IV 28 A CITIZEN OF Shadows of souls IV Separate from yourself by time, by the tomb and distance, By the infinite dark Where our voices cannot reach; Dumb and lone By the pathway I proceeded: And heard the dogs a-barking at the moon- shine, At the pallid moonshine, And the croaking Of the bull-frogs . . . / was cold with all the coldness that in your bed-chamber Froze your cheek, your blanched temples and your hands beloved. In the snowy whiteness Of your shrouds and sheets. Graveyard cold it was, the ice of death, The cold of nothingness. And my shadow Thrown before me by the moonlight, Moved alone in lonely landscape, A nd your shadow slim and agile, Fine and languid, As in that mild night of spring-tide per- ished, In that night of murmurings and per- fumes, music, wings, BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT N eared and walked therewith, N eared and walked therewith, N eared and walked therewith. Oh, the min- gled shadows, Shadows of bodies that joined with the shadows of souls, Shadows that seek each other in flights of sorrow and tears! Another form of verse which Silva em- ployed in divers ways to ends very diver- gent, is a nine-syllable line made up of three feet of three s^ilables each. As used hitherto, it had been either too soft or too hard: he taught it a sonorous force unex- pected and apparently miknown in Spanish before. In Futura it serves in long para- graphs for a satiric subject, the dedication of a statue to Sancho Panza as patron saint ; in Egalite it sharpens quatrains on a theme worthy of Swift, to the effect that the porter on the comer and the Emperor of China are the same sort of animal; and in parts of All Soids^ Day it serves for the cry- ing and clangour of the bells. The effect of this verse is not unlike some of our English octosyllables, but more striking, 29 AND MONOGRAPHS Another verse IV 30 A CITIZEN OF English parallels because in Spanish, with its acceptance of a vowelled assonance in its multitudinous double rhymes, the use of a strong mfis- culine rhyme ending in a liquid gives ex- traordinary finality and power, with a sort of clang. In Egalite the seven stanzas have a single rhyme. Futura is written, like Crashaw's and Bishop King's octo- syllables, in paragraphs of varying length, but rhymed at the even lines, and these, twenty-three of them, on a single vowel, the open o. The effect is cumulative and tremendous, charging the absurdity of the grotesque theme with a gravity that carries it over into tragi-comedy. In the Dta de Dtfuntos the interlace of rhymes is most ex- quisite, the syllabic harmony sonorous and magnificent: nowhere, unless from the young Milton of Comiis and Lycidas, could English verse supply a parallel. Of the poets called modernists he was the acknowledged leader, the initiator and strongest force of the movement. Perhaps the piece of his maturest work is that called Dia de Defunlos, comparable only to an aBtar-frontal of enamel and niello from IV B R Y N M A W R NOTES THE TWILIGHT 31 Limoges, flawless, gracious and grave - coloured. Of another, nearly double its length, J/ Pie de la Estatua, which is de- voted to Bolivar and inscribed to the city of Caracas, a stranger in ignorance cannot well speak, can simply note as characteristic that his most substantial work should be given to his land and to his dead. The style here is stronger, directer and more sustained than the reader would be pre- pared for: the clear air, the white light, the unalterable bronze against the sk}^, the blond children on the grass, support rather than adorn it; the only metaphor detach- able being that comparison between the great man who "gave liberty to a continent and to the Spanish dominion a grave," and an immense planet: As on mild and lovely nights Jupiter, crowned with lightnings, makes pale in empty space the sidereal light of the stars. Critics who know more about each other's writings than those of poets, have suggested a comparison between Edgar A. Poe's Bells and those of the Dia de Di- At the foot of the statue AND MONOGRAPHS IV \r- ■/J 32 All Souls' Dav IV A CITIZEN OF Juntos. There is no ground for such. Poe's is a jeu d' esprit, Silva's a meditation on hfe and death. In Bogota, as in many other places, the bells on All Souls' Day are rung incessantly for twenty-four hours. No one who has not lived in a city full of the sound of bells, and listened to their voices and understood their speech, could so well interpret them, ''the grieving bells, that speak to the living- of the dead." Thick the day — the light is old — The fine rains fall and soak With penetrant threads the city deserted and cold: A dark thick lethal melancholy cloak. In the shadowy air, invisible hands Pinfold. There is none hut shrinks, leaving his word tmspoke, Seeing the grey mist through the sombre air unrolled; Hearing still, far overhead Dark and grievous, uttered With a pause and with a stammer. Dreary accents of misgiving, — All the hells that cry and clamour. Grieving bells that tell the living Of the dead. B R Y N M A W R NOTES THE TWILIGHT 33 Something there is, anxious, dubitable, Mingling its outcry in the enormous din, Striking a discord through the according swell With which the bronze bells toll and toll the knell For all those that have been. It is the voice of the bell That strikes the hour of the day, Equal, sonorous, rhythmical, Today as yesterday; And here is a bell that complains, Another is weeping there, This with an aged woman's pains, And that like a child in prayer. The bigger bells that ring a double chime Sound with an accent of mystical scorn; But the bell that tells the time Is laughing, not forlorn. In its dry timbre are subtle harmonies, Its voice bespeaks holidays, jollities, A ppointments, pleasures , dancing and song, The things that we think about all day long. 'Tis a mundane voice in a choir of friars, And laughing the light notes fall. Mocking and skeptical, At the bell that groans At the bell that moans, The town clock AND MONOGRAPHS IV 34 A CITIZEN OF And all that the choirs of bells recall; And with its ring-ting-ting It measures the sorrows of all, The time when each grief tires And the end of sorrowing. The church bells TV Therefore it laughs at the great bell overhead That tolls and tolls its endless knell for the dead; Therefore it interrupts the voices strong With which the christened metal grieves for the dead so long. Listen not, bronzes, listen not, bells. That with deep voices clamouring call to mind, Pray for the beings that sleep in their shells. Away from life, freed from desiring. Far from hard battles of the human kind; Swing in the air and tumble untiring, Listen not. bells .... Against the impossible what avails our desiring? Up aloft rings, rhythmical and sonorous. That voice of gold, A nd tmabashed by the prayer of her sisters old That pray in chorus, BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT 35 The bell of the clock Rings and rings, rings on yet. Saying: "/ set With sonorous vibration The hour of the forgotten;'' That after the shock And the black congregation Of relatives gotten Together and sighing, While over the bier With white lilies dying The candles burn clear; That after the grief And the sobbing and wailing, The utterance brief And the tears unavailing — Then the moment it sets When weeds are a weariness, And thought turns again From the dead, from regrets. From languor and dreariness, After six months, or ten. And today, the Day of the Dead, as melan- choly awoke. Brooding in the grey mists that oppress And the fine rains that fall and soak Racking the nerves with dolour and distress, Wrapping the dark city as in a cloak: Mourning AND MONOGRAPHS IV 36 Pleasure A CITIZEN OF The clock, that marked the hour and the day When in each empty house they laid away Their mourning brief and came out brave and gay: The clock that marked the hour of the ball For which, at a yearns end, a girl put on Her delicate Jrock-^— forgotten and alone The mother sleeping by the churchyard wall; — Rings on, indiferent to the urgencies Of the great bell that calls, calls all the while; The clock that marked when came the hour precise That upon lips where grief had set a seal, Back as though by enchantment came the smile, Then in brief space light laughter, peal on peal; That marked the hour in which a widower Was mentioning suicide, asking arsenic, While in the once-perfumed bed-chamber The smell of phenic acid made one sick. That marked the hour once when, over- fraught With ecstacy, he wedded; again, when he To the same church another bride had brought; IV BRYN MAWR NOTES THE TWILIGHT The clock knows nothing of the mystery Of all these plaints that people the grey air, And sees in life nothing hut jollity, And goes on tnarking with indifferent care, The same enthusiasm, the same light graces. The flight of time which everything effaces. This is that anxious tone and dubitable That floats in the enormous din. This the ironic note that throbs in the swell With which the bronze bells toll and toll the knell For all those that have been. 'Tis the fine and subtle voice Vibrating and crystalline With an accent like a boVs Indiffereyit to good and ill, That marks the shameful hour, still. The fatal hour, the hour divine. Ringing still far overhead. Pealing, rhythmic, and sonorous, Never echoing the misgiving Dark and grievous, uttered With a pause and with a stammer Of the sad mysterious chorus, Of the bells that cry and clamour — Grieving bells that tell the living Of the dead. AND MONOGRAPHS 37 Hours of shame, of doom, or of ecstasy IV 38 JOSE A. SILVA Escape from life At thirty years old, when he died, he had already ^ATitten what cannot be matched upon his continent, nor indeed precisely in the hemisphere, and he was only at the beginnings of his art. His tragedy seems so simple, and so unneces- sary. Poetry had the least of him, but the best. If he had lived through this ferment only a year or two more, till the pressure of money cares had relaxed, till incessant reading and study had brought a kind of satiety, till the sharpness of grief had worn down, till the bitterness of disap- pointment had diminished: if he could only for a little while have escaped from life, as many a man has done without the irretrievable step through the door of death; if he could only, in short, have been a poet by profession! Art for art's sake is a good creed, for more than most things art brings consolation and healing, art occupies and fortifies. IV BRYN MAWR NOTES Printed for BRYN MAWR COLLEGE BY THE John C. Winston Co. philadelphia, pa. 4 X U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES ■ I CDEDlE732b A.S* ♦ ,♦ ••• t • ■ ' E B p i.'ii ^9 '•4 Id ■ ,,,• '.'1 PG f° ^ f Ulliiii CDEDI >i