Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/617
But more magical as summer fades.
The love of dead June seems to cling to them.
I do not touch them now,
For once—
Shall I tell you?
Once I kissed the reddest rose in my garden
And in the morning
I found all its petals strewn in the path.
April brings her violets—
Introspective little things that hide in leaves;
And nuns,—do you ever think of violets as nuns?"
Gracefulness is likely to be this poet's undoing. He already has the trick of it well—almost too well—in hand. But he has more than the trick. It is his spontaneous lyricism, saving him from banalities, that revivifies the old figures in his brief songs. And in the semi-epigrammatic quatrain that is rich in suggestion, he has a nice command of his instrument. I quote two of these:
"Stepping into the closing forest, here,
A sudden silence seemed to seize each bird,
As I stopped breathlessly to overhear
The secret of a last excited word . . ."
"These swords that gleam in broken rows,
Plunged upward through the earth's full veins,
Drip still with scarlet blood although
They have been washed by summer rains."
Mr. Coles' volume contains a number of sonnets which, if the paper jacket can be trusted, "Mr. Coles spent some years in perfecting." "They contain," according the the Foreword written by Horace E. Henderson, A.B., Head Master of English at Pawling School, "no strained attempts to catch the fancy by bizarre expressions, no endeavours to surprise the reader into admiration of audacity." Both statements are incorrect. Mr. Coles' audacity is proved by rhyming "dawn" with "forewarn"; his expressions that