THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW

London, England

October 1904

(PAGE 476)

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.

POETRY

The Argonauts. By Aleister Crowley. Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth.

We do not think that Mr. Aleister Crowley was well advised in choosing for his poetical drama a subject so hackneyed as the Quest of the Golden Fleece, or that he has handled it more successfully than did William Morris in his epic, The Life and Death of Jason. The Argonauts less resembles a classical Greek play than one of Senaca’s rhetorical tragedies. The experiment itself was at best an unpromising one, seeing that the Atlanta in Calydon is the only instance in which an English poet has produced a drama at once Hellenic in form and spirit. The influence of Mr. Swinburne is obvious in:

“O happy of mortals,

O fronter of fear,

The impassable portals!

Ye heavens, give ear.

Our song shall be rolled in the praise of the fold, and its glory be told where the heavenly fold rejoices to hold the stars in its sphere.”

Though Mr. Swinburne would have shunned as cacophonous the fivefold iteration of a single rhyme in an overgrown line. The lyric speeches of Orpheus are sometimes of exquisite beauty:

“Light pearly glimmering through dim gulf and hollow,

Below the foam-kissed lips of the sea;

Light shines from all the sky and up to me

From the amber floors of sand: Light calls Apollo!

The shafts of fire fledged of the eagle follow

The crested surf, and strike the shore and flee

Far from green cover, nymph-enchanted lea,

Fountain, and plume them white as the sea-swallow,

And turn and quiver in the ocean seeming

The glances of a maiden kissed, or dreaming.”