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When I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother, and promised to read them, I had seen none of the press notices of Miss Crane’s talent. Being only a quasi-journalist I seldom read the newspapers. I am extremely skeptical of infant prodigies, and the poems of Nathalia’s that I have since seen most quoted in newspaper articles about her are just what you would expect. They prove nothing except that she is a little girl with a lively fancy. Certain poems in this first collection, however, seem to me to prove something more.

Some long time ago in Scotland there was a little girl named Marjorie Fleming, and to-day a twelve-year-old, Helen Douglas Adam, the daughter of a Scotch parson and his wife of Dundee, is her successor overseas to the juvenile purple. Miss Adam has now been published both in England and America. Yet the best poems of hers that I have read do not seem to me to possess such individuality or such maturity of melody and diction as Miss Crane’s best poems. Then there is our own Hilda Conkling, whose mother is a distinguished American poet, and who writes in free verse and has published several volumes of poems. Hilda is a real poet. But she has never grappled with and conquered certain problems of poetic structure from which Miss Crane, by sheer instinct, seems to have wrested occasional victory.

I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother; and first I read The Blind Girl. I came upon the two verses:

In the darkness who would answer for the color of a rose,

Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes.

Oh, night, thy soothing prophecies companion all our ways,

Until releasing hands let fall the catalogue of days.

These lines and the meditation from which they spring were the spontaneous phrasing and the natural meditation of—a child of ten. That in itself, I think, is sufficiently remarkable.

In the darkness who would cavil at the question of a line,

Since the darkness holds all loveliness beyond the mere design.

Strange insight for a comparative infant!

In her lighter moments—and, naturally, there are a great many—Nathalia’s “heart is all a-flutter like the washing on the line”; she “could not stain romance with monetary fee”; and, when she has sat upon a bumble-bee, she knows “the tenseness of humiliating pain.” Many a grown humorist might envy the freshness of such amusing phrase.

There is much laughter and nonsense in this book—that of a rather romantic little girl with a quick eye and ear and a pert fancy. But there is, as I have intimated, more than that.

Cloud-made mountains towered

Beckoning to me;

Visionary triremes

Talked about the sea.

There were strings of camels

On the Tunis sands.

There were certain cities

Holding out their hands.

Here the thing we call poetry asserts itself. The instinct for remarkable phrase and striking figurative expression is either inborn or it is not. Facility with rhyme and metre is not nearly so remarkable. But when a child can write, as in the poem My Husbands,

I hear in soft recession

The praise they give to me;

I hear them chant my titles

From all antiquity.

it is almost uncanny. Here is, if you like, a somewhat derivative diction, but here also is true poetry by every test.

He showed me like a master

That one rose makes a gown:

That looking up to Heaven

Is merely looking down.

Well, I not only wonder how she has learned simple finality of phrase so quickly; I also wonder whether she can possibly realize the philosophical implications of her best poems.

As for imagery, Nathalia’s angels hearing “the hurdy-gurdies in the Candle-Maker’s Row” is an example of her fancy that quickens into imagination. She sees the Oriental bees flying “in golden convoys to the mountains of the moon,” she quizzically presents the pathos of The Dinosaurs’ Eggs; she has “steered by stars that sorrowed, with the moonlight in our wake”; she sees Berkley Common

Like a manuscript, all yellow, and with many things deleted,

Yet a manuscript completed, with embellishments most rare,

Berkley Common lies forgotten, with its fields of everlasting,

And the sunlight on the windows of the empty houses there.

As to exactly what she is trying to say in The Symbols, I am in doubt, but it is hard to forget the Talmud stalking like a rabbi in a gown.

On the one hand, with Nathalia, we have simply a rhyming gift turned to amusing descriptions of certain fairly ordinary episodes and characteristics of life that interest every healthily alert young lady. On the other hand, we have the beginnings of a poet with a true ear for rhythm, an eye for the color of words, and a fancy that often rises into the realm of imagination. I only hope that the young lady will continue to enjoy all the ordinary incidents of her existence as much as she has heretofore, and to perfect her technique in her spare moments. It needs perfecting. It is hardly to be wondered at that her work is still in the experimental stage. She is not yet “the youngest of the seers,” nor yet “released from fetters of ancestral pose,” but there is undoubtedly conquest of poetic beauty “waiting down the years” for her—“revisions of the ruby and the rose,” as she puts it. Read the first two verses of The Vestal and marvel that a young lady of Nathalia’s age should be able to master without effort such a perfectly Emily Dickinsonian idiom. This is no copy; it is something that even Emily Dickinson would not have been at all ashamed to have written. And that is a good deal to say.

Now as to prophecies, who can make them? Frankly, I have not the slightest idea how Miss Crane’s gift may develop. I only know that she has given signs of astonishing precocity as a young poet. Her parents have wisdom and they will see that she is not spoiled. Her gifts will simply develop according to her experience of literature and her experience of life. It is a very ticklish thing to endeavor in any way to direct so young a gift. It will find by instinct its own nourishment; that is my belief.

Meanwhile, to Nathalia, good luck on the difficult road!

William Rose Benet

New York City, May, 1924.