In the admirable and stimulating lecture given to the English
Association by Professor Spurgeon on "Poetry in the Light of War," I
came again upon that poem of Rupert Brooke's in which he enumerates
certain material things that have given him most pleasure in life. "I
have been so great a lover," he writes, and then he makes a list of his
loves, thus following, perhaps all unconsciously, Lamb's _John Woodvil_
in that rhymed passage which, under the title "The Universal Lover," has
been detached from the play. But Lamb, pretending to be Elizabethan,
dealt with the larger splendours, whereas Rupert Brooke's modernity took
count of the smaller. John Woodvil's list of his loves begins with the
sunrise and the sunset; Rupert Brooke sets down such mundane and
domestic trifles as white plates and cups, the hard crust of bread, and
the roughness of blankets.
This, to strangers to the poem, may not sound very poetical, but they
must read it before they judge. To me it is at once one of the most
satisfying and most beautiful leaves in the Georgian anthology. Here is
a passage:
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter too; and body's pain
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks, and shining pools on grass;
--All these have been my loves.
My reason in quoting these fine and tender lines is to point out how
simple a thing poetry can be; how easily we, at any rate for a few
moments--even the most material, the most world-brutalized of us,--can
become poets too. For I hold that any man searching his memory for the
things that from earliest days have given him most delight, and
sincerely recording them, not necessarily with verbal garniture at all,
is while he does so a poet. A good deal of Whitman is little else but
such catalogues; and Whitman was a great poet. The effort (even without
the reward of this not-always-desired label) is worth making, because
(and this is where the poetry comes in) it forces one to visit the past
and dwell again in the ways of pleasantness before the world was too
much with us and life's hand had begun to press heavily: most of such
loves as Rupert Brooke recalls having their roots in our childhood.
Hence such poetry as we shall make cannot be wholly reading without
tears.
I find that on my list of loves scents would take a very important
place--the scent of gorse warmed by the sun coming almost first, gorse
blossoms rubbed in the hand and then crushed against the face, geranium
leaves, the leaves of the lemon verbena, the scent of pine trees, the
scent of unlit cigars, the scent of cigarette smoke blown my way from a
distance, the scent of coffee as it arrives from the grocer's (see what
a poet I am!), the scent of the underside of those little cushions of
moss which come away so easily in the woods, the scent of lilies of the
valley, the scent of oatcake for cattle, the scent of lilac, and, for
reasons, above all perhaps the scent of a rubbish fire in the garden.
Rupert Brooke mentions the feel of things. Among the loves of the sense
of touch I should include smooth dried beans, purple and spotted, and
horse-chestnuts, warm and polished by being kept in the pocket, and
ptarmigan's feet, and tortoiseshell spoons for tea-caddies. And among
sounds, first and foremost is the sound of a carriage and pair, but very
high in position is that rare ecstasy, the distant drum and panpipes of
the Punch and Judy. Do they play the panpipes still, I wonder. And how
should I behave if I heard them round the corner? Should I run? I hope
so. Scent, sound, touch, and sight. Sight? Here the range is too vast,
and yet here, perhaps, the act of memory leads to the best poetry of
all. For to enumerate one's favourite sights--always, as Rupert Brooke
may be said to have done, although not perhaps consciously, in the mood
of one who is soon to lose the visible world for ever--is to become, no
matter how humble the list, a psalmist.
The mere recollecting and recording even such haphazard memories as
these has had the effect of reconstructing also many too-long-forgotten
scenes of pure happiness, and has urged me about this dear England of
ours too, for I learned to love gorse on Harpenden Common, and pinewoods
at Ampthill, and moss in Kent, and the scent of coffee in the kitchen of
a home that can never be rebuilt, and--but poetry can be pain too.