Rainbow

Richard le Gallienne was the poet laureate of longing, a romantic who believed beauty was the highest truth. The Rainbow collects his most cherished verses, poems that ache with the transience of love and the fleeting glory of sunsets, of pressed flowers, of hands held in twilight. His voice is unmistakable: ornate yet sincere, steeped in the aesthetic movement's devotion to art as its own excuse for being. These are poems written in an age when people still believed poetry could save them from the coarseness of the modern world. Le Gallienne writes of desire and loss with a tenderness that feels almost archaeological now, a relic from when men still wrote flowery letters and meant them. The Rainbow is not poetry for the cynical. It is for readers who want to remember what it felt like to believe that a sunset or a beloved's face was worth a dozen perfect stanzas.