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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