by Christopher Morley. New York; George H. Doran Company. 1921. Large 8vo, xx + 253 pp. $2.50.
WHEN a book of poems is so disarming in its sincerity and humility as Mr. Christopher Morley’s Chimneysmoke, one’s impulse is more toward appreciation than criticism. It is a book that moves one to a happy conviction that one has made friends with an honest human opposite of the bizarre and restless minor poets who buzz at us day in and out.
Mr. Morley dares to say that he loves and wonders at all the everyday things so fiercely repudiated by those other poets, ‘Home’ to him is not a symbol of hateful drabness and conventionality. He can write not only a graceful ‘Song for a Little House,’ or ‘Dedication for a Fireplace,’ but he can sing blithely of dishwashing, of cribs and high chairs and first Christmas trees, and can make brave sport of empty coal-bins and marauding cockroaches. To him the 5:42 chants a song of exultant homecoming, and he is sure that
Heaven is not built of country seats,
But little queer suburban streets.
His musical verse echoes so much of a heart’s deepest content, and the attitude of his spirit is so unaffected in its enthusiastic and whimsical wonder at all the passing show, — from a mounted policeman in the rain to the romance of a telephone directory, — that the human half of the reader of Chimneysmoke is first of all glad of this straightforward serving of the good bread-andbutter of life rather than its nightingales’ tongues and hasheesh.
Within the circle of this substantial human satisfaction, one feels almost ungrateful to miss the one quality that would touch all these happy verses into fire. Mr. Morley knows so well the ways of smooth sweet words and kindly thoughts that one goes hunting instinctively for the one thing needful — the untaught unearthly magic of vision and word. It almost comes: never quite. Chimneysmoke harps one neither up to the gates of Heaven nor down to the hinges of Hell.
But then, it never meant to. This is a book without pretense (save for permitting itself illustrations, which always clamp upon poetry the hard shape of their concreteness). Mr. Morley must be well content that, whatever may be said of his work, no one can discover in him the barren poet of his verse: —
The human cadence and the subtle chime
Of little laughters, home and child and wife,
He knew not. Artist merely in his rhyme,
Not in his life.
FANNIE STEARNS GIFFORD.