POEMS

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

SELECTED BY THE AUTHOR
AND REVISED

CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
LONDON — BOMBAY — SYDNEY

1922

CONTENTS

SONNETS, 1883—1893—

I.-XX

SONNETS, 1895—

XXI.-L

MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS—

ON A VOLUME OF SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY
ON THE DEATH OF A METAPHYSICIAN.
ON A PIECE OF TAPESTRY
To W. P.
BEFORE A STATUE OF ACHILLES
THE RUSTIC AT THE PLAY

ODES—

I.-V
ATHLETIC ODE

VARIOUS POEMS

CAPE COD
A TOAST
PREMONITION
SOLIPSISM
SYBARIS
AVILA
KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL
ON AN UNFINISHED STATUE
MIDNIGHT
IN GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS
SPAIN IN AMERICA
A MINUET

TRANSLATIONS—

FROM MICHAEL ANGELO
FROM THEOPHILE GAUTIER

A SPANIARD IN ENGLAND by EDMUND GOSSE

PREFACE

New editions of books are a venture for publishers rather than authors. The author has committed his rash act once for all at the beginning and he can hardly retract or repeat it. Nevertheless if I had not connived and collaborated at this selection of verses written (almost all of them) in my younger days, they probably would not have reappeared. I therefore owe an apology to my best critics and friends, who have always warned me that I am no poet; all the more since, in the sense in which they mean the word, I heartily agree with them. Of impassioned tenderness or Dionysiac frenzy I have nothing, nor even of that magic and pregnancy of phrasere—ally the creation of a fresh idiom—which marks the high lights of poetry. Even if my temperament had been naturally warmer, the fact that the English language (and I can write no other with assurance) was not my mother-tongue would of itself preclude any inspired use of it on my part; its roots do not quite reach to my centre. I never drank in in childhood the homely cadences and ditties which in pure spontaneous poetry set the essential key. I know no words redolent of the wonder-world, the fairy-tale, or the cradle. Moreover, I am city-bred, and that companionship with nature, those rural notes, which for English poets are almost inseparable from poetic feeling, fail me altogether. Landscape to me is only a background for fable or a symbol for fate, as it was to the ancients; and the human scene itself is but a theme for reflection. Nor have I been tempted into the by-ways even of towns, or fascinated by the aspect and humours of all sorts and conditions of men. My approach to language is literary, my images are only metaphors, and sometimes it seems to me that I resemble my countryman Don Quixote, when in his airy flights he was merely perched on a high horse and a wooden Pegasus; and I ask myself if I ever had anything to say in verse that might not have been said better in prose.

And yet, in reality, there was no such alternative. What I felt when I composed those