Most of these poems are in free verse. Yet there is form in Miss Mackay's freedom. A House is full of feeling and must make its appeal wherever it is read. The death of the son of this house in the war has just been told in London. House, great house, how can you stay quiet like that,
When your only son is killed?
Why do you not cry out, cry out to London? Years, lives, stones, iron, rust, bones, mould and mildew of the centuries, call to this poet, and she voices their souls. Roads Calling is very lyrical and haunting. It has been said of a prose work by this author that it has the grace of Maeterlinck's delicate reveries, and this is true of many of her poems. Wind and Shadows, with its lure of the mystical, hidden, might have been written by Maeterlinck himself. Train is full of Maeterlinckian lines; take, for instance, these: Terrible that the minutes go.
Terrible that the minutes never go.
* * * * *
God, make the train start!
Before they cannot bear it! A carper might call Miss Mackay's poems reminiscent, for she takes frankly what past languages and literatures have offered to her, as our modern composers have not hesitated to take, for all their originality, the message of the ages. She knows her Bible, and often flavors her stanzas with a turn from the Litany. And we hear the Song of Solomon singing through her lines. If her reminiscence is excusable, it is because she has something to say. The following brief quotation is a fair example of her clear thought: White moon of trees and towers,
Sailing, sailing,
So calm and high,
You look upon the France of war,
And the thing of all most cruel
Is your peace. -Poetry, Vol. 9 [1917]