THE ABERDEEN PRESS AND JOURNAL

Aberdeen, Scotland

23 August 1921

(page 2)

NEW VERSE.

EASTERN SCENES IN ENGLISH.

Songs of the Groves. The Vine Press. 7s. 6d.

The anonymous author [Victor B. Neuburg] of these “Records of the Ancient World,” as they are called in the sub-title, has gone to the ancient Greeks, to the Romans, and to Mediterranean antiquity generally for his inspiration. He has the poetic gift of that there is no doubt. He has the sense of classical propriety, and the love of beauty; but occasionally the two clash, and instead of the stately restraint of the Hellenic muse we get an amplification of it in the non-Hellenic, very sensuous Swinburnian manner. The author, also, is not always altogether happy in his selection of verse; the “Chant Royal of Horace” is set in a heavy stanza which labours, and in which the meaning is obscured; and the rhymed vers libre of “Gold Night” irritates with its syncopations of rhythm. But the “Lament for Adonis,” “from the Greek of Bion of Smyrna,” is beautifully rendered, the charm lying less in the individual lines than in the cumulative effect; and the author succeeds nowhere in painting a more lovely picture than that conveyed in the first stanza of the “Dedication”—

The breathless night is dark and blue,

Sleeping without a stir or stain,

And underneath her dreams peeps through

Dawn, like a silver vein

In a “Song of Stars” the same ethereal yet natural beauty is captured, while only the incongruous epithet—“the fruitful Sea”—spoils the passionate intensity of “Lucius by the Sea-Shore.” The whole collection is distinctly noteworthy as an artistic example of the blending, with considerable success, of the Ancient with the Modern genius. It is almost unnecessary to add of a Vine Press publication that the letter-press is a joy in itself.