Minor Poet and Other Verse, A.
[Judaica]. Levy, Amy. A Minor Poet and other Verse. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891.
8vo.; frontispiece photograph of the author tipped in; endpapers stained; t.e.g.; green paper-covered boards, cream cloth spine, extremities worn, spine browned.
Second edition of this collection of poetry. Part of Fisher Unwin’s “Cameo Series,” which included Yeats’s The Countess Kathleen the next year. A preliminary note comments: “This volume is a reprint of that issued in 1884, with the addition of a sonnet and a translation, from a volume published in Cambridge in 1881, and now out of print.” The poems range widely in style and subject matter, from a lyrical epitaph to a verse drama, “Medea (A Fragment in Drama Form, After Euripides).” The other poem inspired by ancient Greece, “Xantippe,” previously appeared in University Magazine and a Cambridge poetry collection. Levy experiments further by including a line of music with the love poem “To Sylvia,” presumably for the song quoted in the first stanza. The title poem, in the voice of a friend of a deceased poet, might express an understanding Levy herself wished for:
In the table drawer
Large schemes of undone work. Poems half-writ;
Wild drafts of symphonies; big plans of fugues;
Some scraps of writing in a woman’s hand:
No more—the scattered pages of a tale,
A sorry tale that no man cared to read.
Alas, my friend, I lov’d him well, tho’ he
Held me a cold and stagnant-blooded fool,
Because I am content to watch, and wait
With a calm mind the issue of all things
Certain it is my blood’s no turbid stream;
Yet, for all that, haply I understood
More than he ever deem’d; nor held so light
The poet in him.
(#1348)
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