A BRAVERY OF EARTH
By Richard Eberhart '26. London, Jonathan Cape, 1930. 128 pages.
For several years Mr. Eberhart has been writing lyrics that have caught the attention of those following the work of the younger poets, but "A Bravery of Earth" is his first long poem. Written while its author was in residence at St. John's College, Cambridge, and published in attractive form by the English firm of Jonathan Cape, it is a poem of some 8200 lines, in a loose three-or fourstress meter, for the most part unrhymed. Its theme is youth's search for reality, through three natural stages. First, he seeks the meaning of life through sense-contacts with the world about him; next, through introspection; last, through action. In the third experience only does he find reality. The conclusion of the poem summarizes its whole theme; "Into the first awareness trembling, Girded with mortality; Into the second awareness plunging, Impaled upon mentality; Into the third awareness coming To understand in men's action Mankind's desire and destiny, Youth lies buried and man stands up In a bravery of earth."
And then are repeated the opening lines of the poem: "This fevers me, this sun on green, On grass glowing, this young spring," signifying that he has recovered the joy of existence that was his birthright.
The faults of the poem are many and obvious. Like most youthful poets, Mr. Eberhart has been led by the intensity of his devotion to his art into the assumption of affectations that weaken his effect. Those most annoying to the reader are unnecessary word-coinings and perversions of the parts of speech, awkward ellipses that instead of producing terseness result merely in choppiness, needless inversions of sentence-structure, and tiresome and meaningless repetitions of words and phrases. More serious than these surface faults, however, is the incoherent and confused philosophizing that pervades the first three-fifths of the poem. Although lighted here and there with passages of great beauty, much of the first two thousand lines seems to deal with ideas that are not of great importance and to express them dully. The philosophical utterances, although evidently sincerely conceived, are often not sufficiently fired with imagination to stir the reader's emotions, and this lack of imaginative power combined with the loose metrical form employed by the poet results in many stretches of flat prose.
I have stressed these shortcomings first that I may give the greater emphasis to my liking for the last fifty pages of the poem. Here Mr. Eberhart casts his vague generalities to the winds, and concentrates 'with compelling vividness upon the concrete details of a voyage in a freighter from San Francisco to China, the Philippines, Sumatra, and the Indian Ocean. The underlying theme here is youth's envisioning of the meaning of life through action, and the poet translates real experiences into deep emotions for us. Now his imagination is clear, his feeling is profound, and he lifts us with him into the realms of pure poetry. These passages sing themselves, and their lovely rhythms and beauteous phrasings haunt us long after we have closed the book.
So, gentle reader, if you are bored when you begin this book, persist, for the dull pages will fade for you when you reach the brilliant third section, and you will close the volume convinced that you have found another young poet to whose maturer work you are going to look forward with eagerness.
Rev. Justin E, Abbott '76 is continuing the publication of his series known as "The Poet-Saints of Maharashtra." The latest volume, printed and published by the Scottish Mission Industries Company, Poona, for Dr. Abbott, is number six, "Stotramala, a Garland of Hindu Prayers, a translation of prayers of Maratha Poet-Saints, from Dnyaneshvar to Mahipati." Two other volumes are in press, and in addition four others are in preparation by the author. According to a prospectus: "With the exception of the verses of the very popular poet Tukaram, no extensive translations of this literature have ever been made. The present series, therefore, makes available to those interested in the religious thought of India a glimpse, for it is only a glimpse, into her Marathi religious literature, and the lives of her ancient saints. Scholars, the world over, have taken an interest in India's Sanskrit literature, but Marathi literature in its old and classic forms, though worthy of study, has been neglected and outside of India her saints are little known."
The May, 1930, issue of Travel contains an article by Sydney A. Clark '12 entitled "Six hundred miles through Belgium."
The June issue of the North AmericanReview contains an article, "Liquor Floods the Campus," by Bill Cunningham '19.
Dr. George E. Gardner '25 is the author of the following articles: "The Precipitating Mental Conflicts in Schizophrenia" in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, May, 1930; and "The Causes of Mental Ill Health Among College Students" in TheAnnals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science, vol. CXLIX, Part 3. May, 1930.
Rev. Ozora S. Davis, D.D., LL.D. 89, is the author of "Four Sonnets" which appears in the Phi Beta Kappa Key for May, 1930.
Frederick A. Bushee, Ph.D. '94, now Professor of Economics and Society in the University of Colorado, is the author of "Social Organization" published by Henry Holt and Company. This volume will be reviewed in a later issue of the MAGAZINE.
"International Arbitral Procedure," by Crawford Morrison Bishop, Ph,D. '06, has been published by the King Brothers Incorporated of Baltimore, Maryland. This book will be reviewed in a later issue of the MAGAZINE.
The Journal of Agricultural Research for May IS, 1930, contains an article by W. W. Eggleston '91 and others entitled "Toxicity of Bikukulla Formosa (Western Bleeding- heart)."
