"
As these poetic creations now stand, they all seem, upon
examination, to incarnate the full-bodied life of distinctive types
of men, centred amid their relations with other men within a
specific social environment, and fulfilling the possibilities for
such unique, dramatic syntheses as were revealed but partially or in
embryo here and there among the other shorter poems of this period
of the poet's growth.
In one important particular the re-arrangement of the "Men and
Women" group of poems made its title inappropriate. The graceful
presence and love-lit eyes of the many women of the shorter
love-poems were withdrawn, and Artemis, Andrea del Sarto's wife, the
Prior's niece--"Saint Lucy, I would say," as Fra Lippo
explains--and, perhaps, the inspirer of Rudel's chivalry, too, the
shadowy yet learned and queenly Lady of Tripoli, alone were left to
represent the "women" of the title. As for minor inexactitudes,
what does it matter that the advantage gained by nicely selecting
the poems properly belonging together, both in conception and
artistic modelling, was won at the cost of making the reference
inaccurate, in the opening lines of "One Word More," to "my fifty
men and women, naming me the fifty poems finished"?--Or that the
mention of Roland in line 138 is no longer in place with Karshish,
Cleon, Lippo, and Andrea, now that the fantastic story of Childe
Roland's desperate loyalty is given closer companionship among the
varied experiences narrated in the "Dramatic Romances"? While as
for the mention of the Norbert of "In a Balcony"--which was
originally included as but one item along with the other contents of
"Men and Women"--that miniature drama, although it stands by itself
now, is still near enough at hand in the revised order to account
for the allusion.
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