Your comments on Gorham’s shrine and gland-totemism convince me that Orage talked as vaguely and arbitrarily in your presence as he did in mine on a similar occasion. Some great boob ought to be hired as a kind of heckler and suddenly burst out in one of those meetings held each year to attract converts,--“Come on now, do your stuff--there’s millions waiting!” Or some such democratic phrase. As I seem to be going through an extremely distrustful mood in regard to most of my own work lately, perhaps some of my present temper may unduly limit my perspective in regard to your _Ode_.[54] I have a kind of perpetual dull cold in the head, however, which may better account for my reaction. But if you can bear to listen awhile to Aunt Harriet then here goes.... The obscurities bother me. Stanza I, OK; and I get along very well until I come to “ambitious” Novembers in II. Why this special epithet--this particular designation for the whole season in relation to the headstones, in fact? As it is stressed so much one chafes against the stubborn dullness that blocks one’s apprehension of your precise intention. The last 6 lines are particularly fine and The _last_--! There is no doubt that you make the theme of the poem a living continuity with the exception of the several places where, I admit, I find it difficult to follow you. The theme of chivalry--a tradition of excess (not literally excess, rather, active faith) which cannot be perpetuated in the fragmentary cosmos of today--“those desires which _should_ be yours tomorrow” but which, you know, will not persist nor find way into action.... Your statement of this is beautiful, and the poem is a POEM with splendidly controlled rhythms and eloquence. But when you come to such lines as “From the orient of the sublime economy/Remember the setting sun” I suddenly feel the thread cut. _Sublime economy_ misses its aim with me, I suddenly seem to see a little of Laforgue’s mannerism too wittily on the scene. What _is_ meant here? I fancy that you could go much better directly from Bull Run to “You hear the shout,” etc. The next verse is superb. The last 7 lines are the climax of the poem. The intensity of this “meditation” gives the lie, of course, to all previous factual statements regarding the impermanency of your grief.... But you are, of course, speaking throughout less from a personal angle than a social viewpoint. Or are you? Both, of course. It was fatuous to have raised this point.... Then you go back to speculation in the next stanza. You go _too_ far in the succeeding, I think. And it, again, is rather obscure--exactly what you mean. The capitalization of sentiment, I take it. A good dig at certain people, but I think the sarcasm is over-bitter, marring the beauty of the poem as a whole. The fierce resignation at the last is beautiful, that irony _will_ sell, if you get what I mean.