THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW

London, England

November 1904

(PAGE 594)

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.

POETRY.

The Star and the Garter. By Aleister Crowley. Boleskine House, Foyers, Inverness: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth.

Mr. Aleister Crowley’s volumes succeed one another with a rapidity that almost takes one’s breath away. The Star and the Garter, hitherto only accessible in a privately printed edition, is now offered to the public at the low price of one shilling. The Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth has assuredly no connection with the S.P.C.K. or kindred bodies; but, whatever its aims may be, it may be congratulated on the format of its publications. But more than wide margins and bold type are needed to make The Star and the Garter understanded of the people, which, like much of the author’s verse, is symbolical and introspective. In form it bears outward semblance to Tennyson’s Maud, but in spirit it is akin to the Poems and Ballads of Mr. Swinburne. Baudelaire and W.E. Henley are discernable literary influences in this feverish riot of soul at odds with flesh in an atmosphere charged with erotic emotion. The physiological explanation of love, in Canto XII, beginning with

“To and fro

The motor axis of the brain

Hits on the cerebellum hard,

Makes the medulla itch;”

and so on to thirteen lines, may be technically correct, but it certainly fails to constitute quintessential poetry. Occasionally Mr. Crowley startles us by prosaic metaphor, as

“Then let not memory shrink abashed,

Once started on this giddy whirl!

Hath not a lightning image flashed

Of my divine boot-button girl?”

Farther on he vouchsafes a quaint explanation of this epithet:

“Her face is round and hard and small

And pretty—hence the name I gave her

Of the boot-button girl.”

We like him best in lyrical passages such as:

“And who is then the moon? Bend close,

And clothe me in a silken kiss,

And I will whisper to my rose

The secret name of Artemis.”