LEAH BODINE DRAKE, The Song of The Sun: Collected Writings. Edited by David E. Schultz. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2020. 767 pp. $30.00 (tpb: ISBN: 978-1-61498-267-8), $60.00 (hardcover: 978-1-61498-266-1).
1.
Besides its importance as a publisher of classic weird fiction and its attending scholarship, Hippocampus Press can not be lauded enough for its fealty to the muse of Verse. Keeping alive the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith, George Sterling, lesser-known lights including Park Barnitz and, even more importantly, contemporary voices such as Donald Sidney-Fryer (long may that troubadour write his songs!) is raison d’être alone for this press. On the horn of The Autumnal Equinox this collection finally appeared after being announced three years ago: An impressive volume in its physicality, with a 2-inch thick spine and the author’s signature in gold on the cloth under the front wraps. What August Derleth and Donald Wandrei did for H. P. Lovecraft’s legacy with the publication of The Outsider and Others in 1939, David Schultz does for Leah Bodine Drake now.
Drake’s A Hornbook for Witches (1950) was the first collection of poetry published by Arkham House, incorporating 47 poems. The Song of The Sun contains these and the rest of her 360 poems, 100 never previously published.
Besides appearing in the small press, Leah Bodine Drake had cracked the market of “the slicks”, including The Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker. Above and beyond the biggest names in the Arkham House line (Lovecraft, Howard, etc.), she also garnered a positive review upon her first book’s release in The New York Times. Her 1939 verse “They Run Again” (Is there a better lycanthropic ode anywhere?) was quoted in full.
The Song also contains Drake’s short stories, 2 or which originally appeared in Weird Tales. The best of these is “Mop-Head” (1951) which was graced with an eldritch illumination by Joseph Eberle sadly not reproduced in this volume. In addition, there are essays and book reviews by her including “Whimsy and Whamsy” (1949) which—despite Drake’s lukewarm assessment—has this reviewer now not only looking for a copy of Stanley Mullen’s Moonfoam and Sorceries (Gorgon Press), but more of the “fan” art of its illustrator, Denver’s Roy V. Hunt. Hunt’s work proves to be worthy of rediscovery, some of it being unique takes in Lovecraftian art for that time or the present. Thank you, Leah!
There is a lengthy section of Drake’s letters including those to Weird Tales (extolling the work of Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, CAS, Algernon Blackwood and others) and 73 to August Derleth alone. Finally, nearly 50 related photographs of Leah Bodine Drake as well as a comprehensive bibliography make this publication even more incredibly useful in re-establishing her importance beyond genre.
2.
Drake is one of the great poets of Faery. Some fine examples of this were published in A Hornbook (such as the classic “Changeling”), but one notable early (1933) narrative “The Ballad of Fair Elspeth” appears here for the first time. The theme of The Pied Piper is used not only in “The Little Piper” (1934) but in “Peddler’s Pack”. Written in 1939, it was later submitted to Anthony Boucher for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction but rejected. That publication’s loss is our gain.
A gnomish peddler offers The Good including
The missing star
From the Pleiad’s throng;
The opening bar
Of the sirens’ song
but upon their rejection, leaves only the detritus of The Bad that must be taken:
A weed from Bluebeard’s funeral-wreath,
Roots of mandrake, dragon’s teeth
There’s a moral for editors there somewhere!
Another inspiration to Drake is the work of Lord Dunsany. The poem “The Stranger” (1938) and prose “Time and the Sphinx” (1947) are both dedicated to him. The verse “Unhappy Ending” (1935) is the most Dunsanian of all, being a mordant tale similar to “The Hoard of The Gibbelins”.
Jason Eckhardt adds illustrations, 15 in number, to the mix. Two fine examples are that for “The Ballad of The Jabberwock” (1946) which concerns the legend(?) of The Jersey Devil and the one for “The Crows” (1955)—being one of Jason’s best works anywhere.
In 1941, Leah wrote in her short essay “To Be a Poet” that “You must feel moonlight, see the wind, taste sunlight and smell colour.” The best poetry summons visuals with its words. After seeing John Duncan’s Symbolist painting of 1923 Ivory, Apes and Peacocks, Drake wrote “The Journey of The Queen of Sheba” in 1937. Originally slated as the finale of A Hornbook for Witches, it was cut due to length as well as being deemed only “borderline fantastical” by the writer and her editor Derleth. May we be able to tarry near these borders longer—it is the standout piece in this collection.
She sat in a peacock-shade throne
On a grey beast out of myth, whose walk
Woke the thunder beneath the ground,
And whose tusks were inlaid with orichalch.
Coming down
From slopes of the Mountains of the Moon
Where rivers are born and dragons hiss;
Plumes of ostrich, and ivory horns
Heaped with spices and ambergris.
Bejeweled verse such as this could have suitably adorned any one of Lin Carter’s anthologies for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series back in the day.
3.
It is necessary for a poet to be steeped in some great tradition of mysticism.
—John Livingston Lowes
Lowes was a Harvard professor whose seminal work was The Road to Xanadu (1927), an examination of S. T. Coleridge’s sources (and one of this reviewer’s most treasured volumes on the shelf). This quote was appended to Drake’s essay “A Poem Should Have” from one of her personal scrapbooks. By her own rite, Leah Bodine drake’s entire oeuvre is part of this great tradition, woven into the tapestry of imagination.
I respectfully take exception to her own evaluation of her work, however. In “Minor Poet” (1947) Drake relates that
On mornings when no withered leaf
Rattled a branch, I’ve watched the strange
Dance of the lonely hippogriff,
Wings folded—still beyond the rangeOf my crude weapon!
For someone who had enjoyed popular reception of her art during her life, Leah Bodine Drake still wanted more. Her “heart fully aware of the legacy of myth” (Schultz) that makes us who we are was her greatest crude weapon. For fantasy readers, this collection is as good a gateway to poetry as any. The magick of her art is accessible as starlight reflected in dew drops on that withered leaf held in one’s hand.