Poetry and the Gods

A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War,
when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes, unheard-of
yearnings which floated out of the spacious twentieth-century drawing room, up
the deeps of the air, and eastward to olive groves in distant Arcady which she
had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off
the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp
which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing as moonlight when it
issued through the foliage about an antique shrine.

Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a
typical product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable
gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because
of the strange home in which she lived, that abode of coldness where relations
were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that,
or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in time and space,
whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts
of her spirit ever to harmonize with the unbeautiful things of contemporary
reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each
moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of
poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else,
though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over
parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of sterile ugliness and
restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent
sunset.

Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive
treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An
observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some
image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or
dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful
compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody

of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and
feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet
had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal,
convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually
faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple,
star-strewn mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.