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Let the Patterns Break
Collects Lorraine's previous books of poetry,
Trailing clouds of glory.
Banners of victory.
Beyond bewilderment.
They.
The day before judgment.
Call on the rocks
Trailing clouds of glory.
Banners of victory.
Beyond bewilderment.
They.
The day before judgment.
Call on the rocks
302 pages, Hardcover
First published February 15, 1947
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January 31, 2015
Lilith Lorraine--a pseudonym--was a poet of the twentieth century's first half, now forgotten, mostly, it seems, because she was a woman.
These poems, collecting everything she wrote through 1947 (including juvenilia she wrote as young as 9, which isn't bad) make clear the tradition she was writing in and deepening. The poems do not really excite me, but I can see their technical merit, and I get a sense of what she was trying to do. The book makes this extra clear by including its own preface as well as the prefaces of the books collected.
Lorraine did not like modern poetry--not at all: "I have declined to be impressed by the anti-poets whom the people have repudiated. It is not the chopped prose, the buzz-saw rhythms, and the intellectual vaporings of these hostlers of the stable of Pegasus that the soldier carries into battle, that the preacher thunders from the pulpit, that the child learns from his text-book, that the pilgrim hurls as a shining weapon at the fearful shapes that close around him in the Valley of the Shadows."
She also didn't like the jinglers and versifiers: "His soul was deaf to vaster implications,/Life's thousand petalled lotus moved him not,/While earth was trembling on its last foundations/He penned some couplets to his garden plot." ("Epitaph to a Versifier.")
Her own work was rooted in poem--"White tentacles of loathsome spidery forms/Glow faintly like the ghosts of vanished flames./The black tarns writhe with sinuous pallid swarms/Of larvae born of man's incestuous shames," went a part of one she wrote at age 14--Wells, and H. Rider Haggard. (There's a poem called "She" about the main character of that novel.) She developed in lines that were similar to those of Clark Ashton Smith and H.p> Lovecraft (indeed, her pseudonym was chosen in part as a reference to George Sterling, Smith's mentor). Those two men had received later critical acclaim, Lorraine not so much.
But although her poems plow the same fields--the transcendence of imagination, the creation of alien worlds, and the importance of viewing life from alien and cosmological perspectives--she is doing her own thing, too. In particular, she weds this science fictional outlook with a Romantic optimism rooted in nineteenth century poetry: "So I've cast my lot with the galaxies where the pathless comets race,/Brushing aside the simpering suns that keep to an ordered pace,/Flinging my Jovian laughter down, through the echoing aisles of space."
It's impossible to read Lorraine and not think of "Invicta" or Tennyson.
Her themes, and the language, can become repetitive: again and again she is compared to an alien or a comet (orbitless). The lack of a sense of humor makes the poems start to drag, too--constant rah-rahs, paeans to the power of humor, but no actual humor. Lorraine--like Lovecraft and Smith--comes across as extremely serious.
She was also something of a feminist, and that comes through several times, too. Hers was an essentialist feminism, with women as inherently peaceful--she was a pacifist--and sharing--a socialist, too: "We shall not sweep too much if brainless man/Hurls back the nations to barbaric might,/For though the centuries have clipped her claws,/Woman is still a cat that stalks the night./We shall walk proudly as a queen enthroned,/Restored to ancient, matriarchal state--/Through all the ages of man's puppet reign/We have purred softly--we have lain in wait."
Although she varies the length of her poems--"They" is a small book--her forms are mostly the same throughout, with little variance in the lines, which also gives the book a sense of repetition. For the most part, these are optimistic poems, even if she mentions something dark ("the poet will either be vindicated or avenged") although the poems in "Beyond Bewilderment" take on a very bitter edge. Over time, her poems also become much more oracular, and the persona behind them much more confident--pitying those who do not have the poet's vision. The last set of poems even starts to step away from the science fictional and fantasy themes, making them some of the least interesting--simply because they come across as either more derivative or more bloviating.
These poems, collecting everything she wrote through 1947 (including juvenilia she wrote as young as 9, which isn't bad) make clear the tradition she was writing in and deepening. The poems do not really excite me, but I can see their technical merit, and I get a sense of what she was trying to do. The book makes this extra clear by including its own preface as well as the prefaces of the books collected.
Lorraine did not like modern poetry--not at all: "I have declined to be impressed by the anti-poets whom the people have repudiated. It is not the chopped prose, the buzz-saw rhythms, and the intellectual vaporings of these hostlers of the stable of Pegasus that the soldier carries into battle, that the preacher thunders from the pulpit, that the child learns from his text-book, that the pilgrim hurls as a shining weapon at the fearful shapes that close around him in the Valley of the Shadows."
She also didn't like the jinglers and versifiers: "His soul was deaf to vaster implications,/Life's thousand petalled lotus moved him not,/While earth was trembling on its last foundations/He penned some couplets to his garden plot." ("Epitaph to a Versifier.")
Her own work was rooted in poem--"White tentacles of loathsome spidery forms/Glow faintly like the ghosts of vanished flames./The black tarns writhe with sinuous pallid swarms/Of larvae born of man's incestuous shames," went a part of one she wrote at age 14--Wells, and H. Rider Haggard. (There's a poem called "She" about the main character of that novel.) She developed in lines that were similar to those of Clark Ashton Smith and H.p> Lovecraft (indeed, her pseudonym was chosen in part as a reference to George Sterling, Smith's mentor). Those two men had received later critical acclaim, Lorraine not so much.
But although her poems plow the same fields--the transcendence of imagination, the creation of alien worlds, and the importance of viewing life from alien and cosmological perspectives--she is doing her own thing, too. In particular, she weds this science fictional outlook with a Romantic optimism rooted in nineteenth century poetry: "So I've cast my lot with the galaxies where the pathless comets race,/Brushing aside the simpering suns that keep to an ordered pace,/Flinging my Jovian laughter down, through the echoing aisles of space."
It's impossible to read Lorraine and not think of "Invicta" or Tennyson.
Her themes, and the language, can become repetitive: again and again she is compared to an alien or a comet (orbitless). The lack of a sense of humor makes the poems start to drag, too--constant rah-rahs, paeans to the power of humor, but no actual humor. Lorraine--like Lovecraft and Smith--comes across as extremely serious.
She was also something of a feminist, and that comes through several times, too. Hers was an essentialist feminism, with women as inherently peaceful--she was a pacifist--and sharing--a socialist, too: "We shall not sweep too much if brainless man/Hurls back the nations to barbaric might,/For though the centuries have clipped her claws,/Woman is still a cat that stalks the night./We shall walk proudly as a queen enthroned,/Restored to ancient, matriarchal state--/Through all the ages of man's puppet reign/We have purred softly--we have lain in wait."
Although she varies the length of her poems--"They" is a small book--her forms are mostly the same throughout, with little variance in the lines, which also gives the book a sense of repetition. For the most part, these are optimistic poems, even if she mentions something dark ("the poet will either be vindicated or avenged") although the poems in "Beyond Bewilderment" take on a very bitter edge. Over time, her poems also become much more oracular, and the persona behind them much more confident--pitying those who do not have the poet's vision. The last set of poems even starts to step away from the science fictional and fantasy themes, making them some of the least interesting--simply because they come across as either more derivative or more bloviating.
Displaying 1 of 1 review