Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/259
it has only fifteen lines and to add any more would spoil it. I think I can improve Wild Grapes a bit. There are two or three words in it I’ve always been dubious about. They don’t exactly express fully what I want to say, but I can’t find any others that do, either. I wish one could coin words, as I used to do long ago when I wrote letters to Father and just invented a word whenever I wanted one. But then, Father would have understood the words if he had ever seen the letters—while I am afraid the judges in the contest wouldn't.
“Wild Grapes should certainly win the prize. This isn’t conceit or vanity or presumption. It’s just knowing. If the prize were for mathematics Kath Darcy should win it. If it were for beauty Hazel Ellis would win it. If it were for all round proficiency, Perry Miller—for elocution, Ilse—for drawing, Teddy. But since it is for poetry, E. B. Starr is the one!
“We are studying Tennyson and Keats in Senior Literature this year. I like Tennyson but sometimes he enrages me. He is beautiful—not too beautiful, as Keats is—the Perfect Artist. But he never lets us forget the artist—we are always conscious of it—he is never swept away by some splendid mountain torrent of feeling. Not he—he flows on serenely between well-ordered banks and carefully laid-out gardens. And no matter how much one loves a garden one doesn’t want to be cooped up in it all the time—one likes an excursion now and then into the wilderness. At least Emily Byrd Starr does—to the sorrow of her relations.
“Keats is too full of beauty. When I read his poetry I feel stifled in roses and long for a breath of frosty air or the austerity of a chill mountain peak. But, oh, he has some lines—
Of perilous seas, in faërylands forlorn’—
“When I read them I always feel a sort of despair! What is the use of trying to do what has been done, once and for all?