Further Verses from the pen of Michael Strange

During the past year it has become public knowledge that Michael Strange is the pseudonym adopted, in her published writings, by a young woman conspicuous in the fashionable life of New York. The poems printed on this page represent her most recent work and have never before been published.

Fate

I AM Fate,

The thrown back noose;

The lapse into unconsciousness;

The revitalized echo.

I peer from the faces of pools, at dusk, From the up-flung eyes of praying women, From the roar and flux of the eternal tides. My direction speaks In the curiosities of children,

Among the impulses of manhood,

And in the sympathies of age.

I drive all caravans To their next resting;

I tune each instrument For its latest song;

Since I comprise the gait Of every purpose;

I, who am Fate,

The reins upon Time,

The inevitable way,

The brow of Destiny.

Why!

WHY some down-flying bird Shakes a slumbering rose;

Why a poet's muse—leads on—or goes, God knows!

Why Love, juggling with gleams,

Should alight on your sill,

Singing to you—Fulfill, Fulfill,

'Til you rise, cry out—and find the air still. Why Birth is launched amid shrieks and cries,

Why Life is spun from a thread of sighs, Until Death sweeps up, on his flight of crows—

God knows;

Autumnal

TO-NIGHT the inland sea hurls through the air

Her foam. The trees twist, silver-limbed and bare!

A new strength mutters in the wind, while I—

I feel the nails of Time among my hair!

Solitude

I AM Solitude,

The master of thought,

The mood of sorrow,

The whistler for dreams.

I dwell in the fixed look Of sad eyes,

And in the questioning smile The soul gives strangers.

I live in the phrase That is never answered;

In the ultimate Why Of the cloistered heart.

I call my élèves At the Autumn's moonrise; And, during the Winter's Snow-mad nights,

I sing to them Of the loves of angels,

And the dying words Of the passing Gods.

For I am Solitude,

The master of thought,

The mood of sorrow,

The whistler for dreams.

Sunset—An Impression

COLUMNS of golden smoke,

Floating against aquamarine; Ribbed mantles of purple rose, Stretching across sapphire-musk; Fissures—slate colored—

Expanding into white, and widening Among greens. Reds!

Then wind-pulled, dust grey snow-fields, Hardening to black.

NO summary of Michael Strange's work can be counted complete without a reference to its most salient virtues and chief defects. By defects is meant, first, the occasional lack of form in her poems—perhaps the result of a contempt for technical metric formulae—and, second, a somewhat too insistent introspection. To the latter defect we attribute a feeling, as we read her outpourings of witnessing the tortures of an intellect whose subtleties have turned back upon itself. Her introspection is at times so complete that she seems as one employing a delphic alphabet, with the meaning of which she is, alone among mortals, familiar. In this she a little resembles the futurist painters, who express themselves in symbols which convey emotions that are poignant to them, but without definite meaning to others.

The virtues of Michael Strange's work lie in the highly emotional qualities discernible in it: in the daring of her metaphors and similes, and in her power of evoking the true atmosphere of drama. She has, too, a decided gift for satire; a wit and cleverness of phrase which challenge our interest; an occasional, and charming, whimsicality; and always something of golden Youth, something intangible but none the less appealing. So that, notwithstanding the lack of clarity in their outline and the morbid introspection often so evident in them, her poems are calculated to arrest the attention of a public long swamped by the ordinary "magazine" verse of our day, verse which, though irreproachable in form, is nevertheless wholly undistinguished in thought, in drama, or in emotion.

When Michael Strange's dramatic, satirical and emotional qualities manifest themselves in her work—simply, directly and without confusion—her poems invariably awaken in us a hearty and sympathetic response.