Once in the dear dead days beyond recall (1900, to be exact) a small book appeared under the weighty title of The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai. It was the work of one Frederic Ridgely Torrence. It was his first volume of poetry. And now, after the passage of twenty-five years, Mr. Torrence presents the public with his second volume of poetry, Hesperides. Such a hiatus in a poet's career is unusual, although, to be strictly accurate, Mr. Torrence has not been entirely silent. He has published three volumes of plays in the interim, and occasional poems from his pen have appeared at wide intervals in various publications. But, even so, the average writer of verse does not hesitate for a quarter of a century between books. Such deliberateness or modesty or fear of the public is an extraordinary attribute of the poet, who generally rushes into print although all the wild horses in the world (critical wild horses, of course) are tugging the other way. In the case of Mr. Torrence the silence was strange, for he had nothing to fear. His equipment was the equipment of a born poet and matured technician. He had something to say and a distinguished manner of saying it. Hesperides is a book that may be placed immediately among the choicer treasures of an era that is fairly rich in poetry. Unlike Rip Van Winkle, the muse of Mr. Torrence awakes from her long slumber to find herself as bright-eyed, as perilous-haired, as warm-limbed as ever.

Of course, it is a new Torrence in many ways that is revealed in Hesperides. That was to be expected. After all. The House of a Hundred Lights was the work of a youth, a youth under the influence of Persian insouciance. The fatality of Omar is not particularly present in this early work, although evidences of his sharp humor are to be discerned. Mr. Torrence could write in those days:

“Doubt everything,” the Thinker said,
When I was parched with Reason's drought,
Said he, “Trust me, I've probed these things;
Have utter faith in me—and doubt!”
Though the sky reel and Day dissolve,
And though a myriad suns fade fade out,
One thing of earth seems permanent
And founded on Belief: 'tis—Doubt.

This was a young man writing, a young man who took pleasure in turning quips into verse. But behind the neat quatrains of this first book an authentic poet constantly glimmered forth. It is true that the glimmering was often rather wan, but still it was preceptible enough to arouse some expectancy concerning the writer's next book of verse. There was no next book of verse. Instead of this there was El Dorado, a poetic drama about Coronado. And after this there was another poetic drama. Abelard and Heloise. And, closing the procession of plays, was that excellent book of negro dramas which included Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams and Simon the Cyrenian. The lyric pulse beat in these plays and readers wondered vaguely what had become of the poet, why he delayed so long in the production of another book of verse. A curiosity crystallized about Torrence, and it is probably true to affirm that he was the best-known unproductive poet in the country. One saw his name and an occasional bit of verse in a magazine, and that was all. But it was enough to carry on belief in him and to say. “Wait until Torrence publishes another volume of poetry. It will be good.” It is. Hesperides richly vindicates the faith of those lovers of poetry who have waited no patiently.

Certain aspects of Hesperides may be noted. First of all, there is that fine art of poetic succinctness that is the mark of the mature craftsman. The ability to write a lyric compact with poignant overtones, with not an excess word or a phrase displaced, is part of the admirable equipment which belongs to Mr. Torrence. Two of his better-known efforts are amply illustrative of this. In “Three o'Clock” and “The Son” the reader will note achievements that are surely a part of any anthology of this era that may be compiled. “The Son” is, perhaps, better known than “Three o'Clock” and therefore it will be more pleasing to quote the latter.

The jewel-blue electric flowers
Are cold upon their iron trees.
Upraised, the deadly harp of rails
Whines for its interval of ease.
The stones keep all their daily speech
Buried, but can no more forget
Than would a water-vacant beach
The hour when it was wet.
A whitened few wane out like moons,
Ghastly from some torn edge of shade;
A drowning one, a reeling one,
And one still loitering after trade,
On high the candor of a clock
Portions the dark with a solemn sound.
The burden of the bitten rock
Moans up from underground.
Far down the street a shutting door
Echoes the yesterday that fled
Among the days that should have been
Which people cities of the dead.
The banners of the steam unfold
Upon the towers to meet the day;
The lights go out in red and gold;
But time goes out in gray.

In looking through these shorten poems one will be immediately impressed with the felicity of phrase, the inborn and delicately adjusted lyricism, and the ever-present realization of the poet's high calling. There are no experimentations here for the sake of experimentation, although there are complicated and triumphantly completed forms, such, for instance, as may be found in “The Singers in a Cloud.” The lines are surcharged with a singing magic and the thought is swept along with them. It is this fine marriage of metre and meaning that lifts Mr. Torrence's best poetry to such a distinguished plane. In the main it is a lyrical thought that concerns him, the exaltation of reasoning, and because this is so he is set apart from that group of modern singers who strive to give poetic form to deeper analysis. He does not dig so deeply into the vexed and subterranean rivers of being as E. A. Robinson, for instance, but he makes peculiarly his own that sensitive and intuitive approximation of passion and pain and ardor and poignancy that is a portion of the highest lyricism. In a certain sense he is not a modernist at all. Rather does he belong to that type of singer that was once so ably represented by William Vaugn Moody. He is not like Moody, although the same moral earnestness seems to possess him at times. In a last analysis he is himself.

Certain longer poems are included in Hesperides, and it is in these that we get the most extended thought of Mr. Torrence. Among these may be noted “Hesperides,” “The Lesser Children,” “Eye-Witness,” and two “Rituals for the Events of Life.” “Hesperides,” itself is a symbolic drama in petto, the musical revelation of a discouraged poet in Washington Square suddenly witnessing a vision of the Golden Age. It is beautifully done both in form and through development. The verse technique is admirable, as the first stanza may show.

Here in the May-bright square of the city he stood,
Young on a morning that now seems a world away;
When the trees that he stared among seemed an evil wood
With a silence coiled at the root aimed straight at the day.
And he thought of a hillside orchard with bees asway
And he looked at the towers and thought they were better in sand,
Here where the gods he had sickened all year to obey
Portioned his breath and his dreams with a brute command,
Under the apples of life like a ripe father's hand.

The poet stands there, and suddenly “a gleam rivered the air,” and the modern vista vanishes. He stands

In a golden shadow there on the beach
Under the apples of life like a ripe world each
And the gold hanging over its image of gold in the sea
Forever hung from the bough and the young fruit grew
Forever, through fountains heard in the sound of the tree
Over the garden, and dancers moved in the dew
With words of a happier song than any he knew,
And the tree's least leaf gave light of a deeper kind
Than any ray of the sky that a bough let through
And the shining fruit bore deeper sight in his mind
For it shone on the people he thought he had left behind.

“Eye-Witness” is another poem which will delight the reader. Beside the subject matter, it is written for the most part in a light tripping measure that ripples and dances like a brook. A jauntiness of expression animates this poem and yet it is what might be termed religious throughout. Indeed, a moral persuasion (it would, perhaps, be too much to refer to it as religious) threads a goodly part of the poetry of this book. In the rituals which close the volume, one for birth and one for the passing of the body, this solemn note is sounded and lifted to an impressive height of utterance.

Hesperides is a distinguished addition to the body of contemporary American poetry. It is not the sort of book to which a reader may turn for examples of modernistic endeavor and new explorations in the potentialities of poetic form, but it is one that is compact with the fine essence of real poetry, a poetry that is written in established forms, but which is yet curiously modern in its inflections and nuances. No one can doubt the vitality of this utterance and nothing but admiration can be extended the author who has matured so excellently and wisely. Although twenty-five years elapsed between the first and second books of poetry by Mr. Torrence, it is safe to wager that those readers who were attracted by the first small offerings and intrigued by the possibilities of future work on the poet's part, will approach Hesperides with an unabated expectancy. They will be satisfied, too. Sometimes a long silence is a good thing. However, it is to be hoped that Mr. Torrence's third book is not delayed until 1950. Such a procedure would be unfair to the admirers he gained back in 1900, for while it is manifestly true that art is long it is equally true that life is fleeting. If it was through any hesitancy that Mr. Torrence has remained silent for so long, this second book should ease his doubts. Most of his contemporaries have vanished (the contemporaries of 1900), but some of them remain. Robinson, Bliss Carman, Lizette Wordsworth Reese, and Alice Brown, to name but a few well-differentiated souls. Mr. Torrence with his single book (for The House of a Hundred Lights is unobtainable) may well be tranked with them without comparative measuring of stature. To be so placed because of a hundred pages of poetry is no mean compliment.