Mr. Obadiah Geek has broken his long silence to some purpose. Those
who remember his pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic
romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which
lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to
the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic
poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of
war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek
in the Egg Control Department) could scarcely have failed to imprint
their mark on the author of _Eros in Eruption_; and so he has given
us a real epic, whose very title, _Ad Astra_, is symbolic of the
high altitudes in which he so triumphantly and so securely navigates.
Outwardly it is a story of the War, but there is little difficulty in
probing the allegory; and those who follow the hero's vicissitudes
as a private in the Gasoliers, right through to his victorious
advancement to the rank of Acting Lance-Corporal, unpaid (and there is
a symbolism even in the "unpaid"), will readily supply the application
to the affairs of everyday life.
The ten thousand odd lines of this inspired poem are liberally
enlivened with those characteristic flashes which Mr. Geek's previous
efforts have led us to expect. Nothing could be happier than
the following, descriptive of the hero's early days on the
barrack-square:--
The Sergeant rolled his eyes toward the azure
And called down curses on my bloody head...
"You buzz about," his peroration ran,
"Like a bluebottle in a sugar-bowl.
Thank God we have a Navy!" and my feet,
Turned outward, as they had been drilled to turn,
At forty-five degrees or thereabouts,
Itched to join issue with his swollen paunch;
But I refrained.