FullReads

“Publishing a volume of verse,” Don has plaintively observed, “is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo.” Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come. Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading their works aloud to the women’s clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses, fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into circulation. Any reader who went to Dreams and Dust (poems, published October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question the answerless face of life–

Still mounts the dream on shining pinion,
Still broods the dull distrust;
Which shall have ultimate dominion,
Dream, or dust?

Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll Durham cigarettes.

How neat this is:

TO A DANCING DOLL

Formal, quaint, precise, and trim,
You begin your steps demurely–
There’s a spirit almost prim
In the feet that move so surely.
So discreetly, to the chime
Of the music that so sweetly
Marks the time.

But the chords begin to tinkle
Quicker,
And your feet they flash and flicker–
Twinkle!–
Flash and flutter to a tricksy
Fickle meter;
And you foot it like a pixie–
Only fleeter!

Not our current, dowdy
Things–
“Turkey trots” and rowdy
Flings–
For they made you overseas
In politer times than these
In an age when grace could please,
Ere St. Vitus
Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;
Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!

But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real earnestness that underlies his chaff.

I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by Plato in the Republic (not the New Republic) or by Samuel Butler in his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of letters every day–(“The ravings fed him” as Don captioned some contrib’s quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist’s trade secret compares it to the boarding-house keeper’s rotation of crops:

MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)

TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday’s serious idea. (COLD ROAST BEEF.)

WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF STEW.)

THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday’s josh of Monday’s serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)

FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday’s josh of Monday’s serious idea–there creeps into our copy a more subdued, sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)