Preface
This is a book of stories. For that reason I have excluded all purely
lyrical poems. But the word "stories" has been stretched to its fullest
application. It includes both narrative poems, properly so called; tales
divided into scenes; and a few pieces of less obvious story-telling import
in which one might say that the dramatis personae are air, clouds, trees,
houses, streets, and such like things.
It has long been a favourite idea of mine that the rhythms of `vers
libre\' have not been sufficiently plumbed, that there is in them a power of
variation which has never yet been brought to the light of experiment. I
think it was the piano pieces of Debussy, with their strange likeness to
short vers libre poems, which first showed me the close kinship of music
and poetry, and there flashed into my mind the idea of using the movement
of poetry in somewhat the same way that the musician uses the movement
of music.