The American humorist Don Marquis, who wrote the archy and mehitabel stories, once said that “publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” Paul Elder published many unremarkable volumes of poetry, and those authors would surely have smiled ruefully at Marquis’s quip.
In the case of Greville d’Arville’s Omega et Alpha, however, the echo was loud and clear: it was the reviews of the critics, and they were not kind. In the magazine The Land of Sunshine, one reviewer wrote: “Doubtless as bad poems have been written before as those in Grenville D’Arville’s Omega et Alpha, but they seldom get into book form. And a very pretty book the publishers have made of this assault upon grammar and poetic feeling. D. P. Elder & Morgan Shepard, San Francisco. $1.25.”1The Land of Sunshine, vol. 12, no. 1, December 1899, p58
Perhaps anticipating his awful reviews, Greville begins the book with a poem entitled “To My Critics”:
I fain would ask of thee,
As critics, true and brave,
If I a poet be;
And not a rhyming knave?For if I fail in rhyme,
with mind intent on high,
The lofty heights to climb;
Forgive me then—I die.
And one of the final poems is “The Passing Century,” no doubt one of the examples submitted by the critics as evidence of the assault upon poetic feeling:
Out on the iron crane of time,
Swung by the smith with his mighty arm,
Swings the century, hoary with rime,
Moulden and shapen beneath its barm.Swift as it moves to its graven place,
A shadow it case on the pregnant earth:
Darkly the dawn, of an age, we trace;
Dumb at the thought of its awful birth.
Greville d’Arville was the pen name of Grenville Stevens Pettis (29 Aug 1870, Vallejo CA–21 Dec 1935, Los Gatos CA), the son of John Edson Pettis (1840-1907) and Luella Priscilla Snow (1848-1924). Grenville married Emily Lucy Cohn (1870-1935) about 1929. He was a composer and specialist in Chinese music. Upon his death, he bequeathed musical instruments and books about Chinese Music to Mills College, a lyric drama “Adam and Eve” to the Metropolitan Opera of New York City, and many other compositions to the Library of Congress. He and Emily are buried at the Los Gatos Memorial Park in San Jose, California.
- 1The Land of Sunshine, vol. 12, no. 1, December 1899, p58