Under the thunder of the bars!

and in the final poem "Love and the Garlands" he uses, with workmanship nearly perfect, the trochaic pentameter of Browning's "One Word More" in a sestina. Indeed his feeling for rhythm is so keen and so subtile that some of his verses will not read themselves to an ear less delicately trained than his own; and his work is in a way analogous to the music of certain modern composers. Combined with his generous freedom in trisyllabic feet is the liberty that he takes with orthodox forms in substituting pauses for syllables and in docking the first feet of pentameters. To those persons, now painfully numerous who read poetry aloud without indicating the metre, such variations are of no moment; to most-others they are at first sight difficult and demand for adequate reading a little preliminary study.

Influenced by Spirit of Free Verse

As a poet of the twentieth century, Mr. Auslander is naturally influenced by the spirit which embodies itself in free verse, though there is no technically free verse in his book:--

Only the other night, it seems, only the other night

You passed with the passing of familiar light

From the sky and a certain hill: Oh, at your dying

There was a sound of wild geese crying, crying;

There was a sound of leaves that give up trying

To glow; and all wild beauty drifting, shifting

South, interminably south!

But I cannot give up remembering your swiftly quiet hands and the half-frightened hint of peace over your eyes, your mouth.

Mr. W. S. Gilbert's Pirate King denounces the month of February with verses which approximate in length the final verse. Few survivors of the Victorian age will take kindly to this verse and to the couplet of which it is a part, or will regard a line of twenty-one words and thirty syllables (yoked by rhyme to a line of three words and six syllables) as a satisfactory successor of the traditional Alexandrine or septenary. Yet modern poets must make their own experiments, however daring; and Mr. Auslander's experiments in metre are relatively temperate. In days in which whole paragraphs of prose are accepted as single lines of poetry, Mr. Auslander is conspicuously chary of what have been called "long-earned rhythms".

His experiments in diction and in metaphor seek the sharply out effects which are the glory of the Imagists,--and frequently attain them. Lowell writes of the advantage which the early risers of literature have over us moderns in gathering words while the dew is still fresh on them. When a word which once had a single exact meaning has been worked to nervous prostration what can we do but invent either a new word or a new use of an old one? When the best metaphors have become an old story, what can we do but bring together in fresh metaphors ideas that were never brought face to face before and trust them to make friends? Strange bedfellows are the product not of politics only but of poetry. Mr. Auslander's poetry is rich in quick novelties of metaphors some supremely right, some seemingly artificial,--at least until the reader is accustomed to them,--and all true to Mr. Auslander's poetic faith. This faith, sincere and strong, reveals itself anew as often as we read the poems. They are not light reading; they are good reading, worthy of study for their poetic workmanship, certain of remembrance for the imaginative beauty of their spirit.

In these days to call a poet clean is no slight compliment. Mr. Auslander without raising a moment's suspicion of a didactic purpose, never gravitates to the immoral as so many poets do on occasion. He speaks the poetry that is in him, a poetry pure and high: