【英文原著类】Men, Women and Ghosts(男人、女人和鬼魂).pdf

Men, Women and Ghosts
Men, Women and
Ghosts
by Amy Lowell
1
Men, Women and Ghosts
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.
It was quite evident that this could never be done in the strict pattern
of a metrical form, but the flowing, fluctuating rhythm of vers libre
seemed to open the door to such an experiment. First, however, I
considered the same method as applied to the more pronounced
movements of natural objects. If the reader will turn to the poem, "A
Roxbury Garden", he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give
the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up and
down, elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock.
From these experiments, it is but a step to the flowing rhythm of music.
In "The Cremona Violin", I have tried to give this flowing, changing
rhythm to the parts in which the violin is being played. The effect is
farther heightened, because the rest of the poem is written in the seven line
Chaucerian stanza; and, by deserting this ordered pattern for the
undulating line of vers libre, I hoped to produce somet