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Transcriber's note:
In the original text, a row of spaced periods was used to
separate extracts where lines of the poems were omitted.
In this version these are represented as "....."
Greek text has been transliterated and enclosed by equal
signs (example: =eithe genoimên=).
STUDIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS
by
MARY C. STURGEON
Author of "Women of the Classics" etc.
[Illustration]
New York
Dodd, Mead & Company
MCMXVI
Printed at
The Ballantyne Press
London, England
TO
PROFESSOR W. H. HUDSON
IN GRATITUDE AND ESTEEM
_Acknowledgment_
The author begs to offer warm thanks to the following poets and their
publishers, for the use of the quotations given in these studies:
Mr Masefield and "John Presland"; Mr John Lane for the work of Mr
Abercrombie and Mrs Woods; Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson for the work of
Miss Macaulay and Rupert Brooke; Mr A. C. Fifield and Mr Elkin Mathews
for the work of Mr W. H. Davies; Messrs Constable for the work of Mr de
la Mare; Mr Elkin Mathews, _New Numbers_, and the Samurai Press for the
work of Mr W. W. Gibson; the Poetry Bookshop for the work of Mr Hodgson;
Messrs Max Goschen Ltd. for the work of Mr Ford Madox Hueffer; Messrs
Maunsel and Co Ltd for the work of the members of "An Irish Group" and
of Mr Stephens; the Samurai Press and the Poetry Bookshop for the work
of Mr Monro; and Mr William Heinemann for the work of Mrs Naidu.
Contents
PAGE
LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE 11
RUPERT BROOKE 36
WILLIAM H. DAVIES 53
WALTER DE LA MARE 72
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON 87
RALPH HODGSON 108
FORD MADOX HUEFFER 122
AN IRISH GROUP 137
ROSE MACAULAY 181
JOHN MASEFIELD 197
HAROLD MONRO 217
SAROJINI NAIDU 235
"JOHN PRESLAND" 248
JAMES STEPHENS 282
MARGARET L. WOODS 301
BIBLIOGRAPHY 327
Lascelles Abercrombie
In the sweet chorus of modern poetry one may hear a strange new harmony.
It is the life of our time, evoking its own music: constraining the
poetic spirit to utter its own message. The peculiar beauty of
contemporary poetry, with all its fresh and varied charm, grows from
that; and in that, too, its vitality is assured. Its art has the deep
sanction of loyalty: its loyalty draws inspiration from the living
source.
There is a fair company of these new singers; and it would seem that
there should be large hope for a generation, whether in its life or
letters, which can find such expression. Listening carefully, however,
some notes ring clearer, stronger, or more significant than others; and
of these the voice of Mr Abercrombie appears to carry the fullest
utterance. It is therefore a happy chance that the name which stands
first here, under a quite arbitrary arrangement, has also a natural
right to be put at the head of such a group of moderns.
But that is not an implicit denial to those others of fidelity to their
time. It is a question of degree and of range. Every poet in this band
will be found to represent some aspect of our complex life--its awakened
social conscience or its frank joy in the world of sense: its mysticism
or its repudiation of dogma, in art as in religion: its mistrust of
materialism or keen perception of reality: its worship of the future, or
assimilation of the heritage of the past to its own ideals: its lyrical
delight in life or dramatic re-creation of it: its insistence upon the
essential poetry of common things, or its discovery of rare new values
in experience and expression.
This poetry frequently catches one or another of those elements, and
crystallizes it out of a mere welter into definite form and recognizable
beauty. But the claim for Mr Abercrombie is that he has drawn upon them
more largely: that he has made a wider synthesis: that his work has a
unity more comprehensive and complete. It is in virtue of this that he
may be said to represent his age so fully; but that is neither to accuse
him of shouting with the crowd, nor to lay on the man in the street the
burden of the poet's idealism. He is, indeed, in a deeper sense than
politics could make him, a democrat: perhaps that inheres in the poetic
temperament. But intellectuality like his, vision so brilliant, a spirit
so keen and a sensuous equipment so delicate and bountiful are not to be
leashed to the common pace. That is a truism, of course: so often it
seems to be the destiny of the poet to be at once with the people and
above them. But it needs repetition here, because it applies with
unusual force. This is a poet whose instinct binds him inescapably to
his kind, while all the time his genius is soaring where the average
mind may sometimes find it hard to follow.
One is right, perhaps, in believing that this particular affinity with
his time is instinctive, for it reveals itself in many ways, subtler or
more obvious, through all his work. As forthright avowal it naturally
occurs most in his earlier poems. There is, for example, the
humanitarianism of the fine "Indignation" ode in his first volume,
called _Interludes and Poems_. This is an invocation of righteous anger
against the deplorable conditions of the workers' lives. A fierce
impulse drives through the ode, in music that is sometimes troubled by
its own vehemence.
Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword,
Into the Spirit's hands?
.....
Against our ugly wickedness,
Against our wanton dealing of distress,
The forced defilement of humanity,
.....
And shall there be no end to life's expense
In mills and yards and factories,
With no more recompense
Than sleep in warrens and low styes,
And undelighted food?
Shall still our ravenous and unhandsome mood
Make men poor and keep them poor?--
In the same volume there is a passage which may be said to present the
obverse of this idea. It occurs in an interlude called "An Escape," and
is only incidental to the main theme, which is much more abstract than
that of the ode. A young poet, Idwal, has withdrawn from the society of
his friends, to meditate about life among the hills. All the winter long
he has kept in solitude, his spirit seeking for mastery over material
things. As the spring dawns he is on the verge of triumph, and the soul
is about to put off for ever its veil of sense, when news reaches him
from the outer world. His little house, from which he has been absent so
long, has been broken into, and robbed, by a tramp. The friend who comes
to tell about it ends his tale by a word of sympathy--"I'm sorry for
you"--and Idwal replies:
It's sorry I am for that perverted tramp,
As having gone from being the earth's friend,
Whom she would have at all her private treats.
Now with the foolery called possession he
Has dirtied his own freedom, cozen'd all
His hearing with the lies of ownership.
The earth may call to him in vain henceforth,
He's got a step-dame now, his Goods....
Evidence less direct but equally strong is visible in the later work. It
lies at the very root of the tragedy of _Deborah_, a heroine drawn from
fisher-folk, who in the extremity of fear for her lover's life cries:
O but my heart is dying in me, waiting:
.....
For us, with lives so hazardous, to love
Is like a poor girl's game of being a queen.
And it is found again, gathering materials for the play called _The End
of the World_ out of the lives of poor and simple people. Here the
impulse is clear enough, but sometimes it takes a subtler form, and then
it occasionally betrays the poet into a solecism. For his sense of the
unity of the race is so strong that natural distinctions sometimes go
the way of artificial ones. He has so completely identified himself with
humanity, and for preference with the lowly in mind and estate, that he
has not seldom endowed a humble personality with his own large gifts.
Thus you find Deborah using this magnificent plea for her sweetheart's
life:
... there's something sacred about lovers.
.....
For there is wondrous more than the joy of life
In lovers; there's in them God Himself
Taking great joy to love the life He made:
We are God's desires more than our own, we lovers,
You dare not injure God!
Thus, too, a working wainwright suddenly startled into consciousness of
the purpose of the life-force muses:
Why was I like a man sworn to a thing
Working to have my wains in every curve,
Ay, every tenon, right and as they should be?
Not for myself, not even for those wains:
But to keep in me living at its best
The skill that must go forward and shape the world,
Helping it on to make some masterpiece.
And with the same largesse a fiddling vagabond, old and blind, thief,
liar, and seducer, is made to utter a lyric ecstasy on the words which
are the poet's instrument:
Words: they are messengers from out God's heart,
Intimate with him; through his deed they go,
This passion of him called the world, approving
All of fierce gladness in it, bidding leap
To a yet higher rapture ere it sink.
... There be
Who hold words made of thought. But as stars slide
Through air, so words, bright aliens, slide through thought,
Leaving a kindled way.
Now, since Synge has shown us that the poetry in the peasant heart does
utter itself spontaneously, in fitting language, we must be careful how
we deny, even to these peasants who are not Celts, a natural power of
poetic expression. But there is a difference. That spontaneous poetry of
simple folk which is caught for us in _The Playboy of the Western World
or The Well of the Saints_, is generally a lyric utterance springing
directly out of emotion. It is not, as here, the result of a mental
process, operating amongst ideas and based on knowledge which the
peasant is unlikely to possess. One may be justified, therefore, in a
show of protest at the incongruity; we feel that such people do not talk
like that. The poet has transferred to them too much of his own
intellectuality. Yet it will probably be a feeble protest, proportionate
to the degree that we are disturbed by it, which is practically not at
all. For as these people speak, we are convinced of their reality: they
live and move before us. And when we consider their complete and robust
individuality, it would appear that the poet's method is vindicated by
the dramatic force of the presentment. It needs no other vindication,
and is no doubt a reasoned process. For Mr Abercrombie makes no line of
separation between thought and emotion; and having entered by
imagination into the hearts of his people, he might claim to be merely
interpreting them--making conscious and vocal that which was already in
existence there, however obscurely. There is a hint of this at a point
in _The End of the World_ where one of the men says that he had _felt_ a
certain thought go through his mind--"though 'twas a thing of such a
flight I could not read its colour." And in this way Deborah, being a
human soul of full stature, sound of mind and body and all her being
flooded with emotion, would be capable of feeling the complex thought
attributed to her, even if no single strand of its texture had ever been
clear in her mind. While as to the fiddling lyrist, rogue and poet, one
sees no reason why the whole argument should not be closed by a gesture
in the direction of Heine or Villon.
We turn now to the content of thought in Mr Abercrombie's poetry--an
aspect of his genius to be approached with diffidence by a writer
conscious of limitations. For though we believed we saw that his
affinity with the democratic spirit of his age is instinctive, deeply
rooted and persistent, his genius is by no means ruled by instinct. It
is intellectual to an extreme degree, moving easily in abstract thought
and apparently trained in philosophic speculation. Indeed, his
speculative tendency had gone as far as appeared to be legitimate in
poetry, when he wisely chose another medium for it in the volume of
prose _Dialogues_ published in 1913.
It must not be gathered from this, however, that the philosophic pieces
are dull or difficult reading. On the contrary, they are frequently cast
into the form of a story with a dramatic basis; and although the torrent
of thought sometimes keeps the mind astretch to follow it, it would be
hard to discover a single obscure line. An astonishing combination of
qualities has gone to produce this result: subtlety with vigour,
delicacy with strength, and loftiness with simplicity. Things elusive
and immaterial are caught and fixed in vivid imagery; and often charged
with poignant human interest. No other modern poet expresses thought so
abstract with such force, or describes the adventures of the voyaging
soul with such clarity. It suggests high harmony in the development of
sense and spirit: it explains the apparent incompatibility between his
rapture of delight in the physical world and his spiritual exaltation:
while it hints a reason for his preoccupation with the duality in human
life, and his vision of an ultimate union of the rival powers.
We may note in passing how this reacts upon the form of his work. It has
created a unique vocabulary (enriched from many sources but derived from
no single one), which is nervous, flexible, vigorous, impassioned:
assimilating to its grave beauty words homely, colloquial or quaint,
until the range of it seems all but infinite.
Again, rather curiously, the thought has tended toward the dramatic
form. At first glance that form would seem to be unsuitable for the
expression of reflectiveness so deep as this. Yet here is a poet whose
dominant theme might be defined, tritely, as the development of the
soul; and he hardly ever writes in any other way.
The fact sends us back to the contrast with the Victorians. The
representative poet then, musing about life and death and the evolution
of the soul, felt himself impelled to the elegiac form, or the idyll.
But the nature of the thought itself has changed. The representative
poet now does not stand and lament, however exquisitely, because reality
has shattered dogma: neither does he try to create an epic out of the
incredible theme of a perfect soul. He accepts reality; and then he
perceives that the perfect soul _is_ incredible, besides being poor
material for his art. But on the other hand, while he takes care to
seize and hold fast truth: while it does not occur to him to mourn that
she is implacable: he resolutely denies to phenomena, the appearance of
things, the whole of truth. That is to say, he has transcended at once
the despair of the Victorians and their materialism. He has banished
their lyric grief for a dead past, along with their scientific and
religious dogmas. That was a bit of iconoclasm imperatively demanded of
him by his own soul; but from the fact that he is a poet, it is denied
to him to find final satisfaction in the region of sense and
consciousness.
Thus there arises a duality, and a sense of conflict, which would
account for the manner of his expression, without the need to refer it
to the general tendency of modern poetry towards the dramatic form.
Doubtless, however, that also has been an influence, for the virility of
his genius and the positive strain in his philosophy would lead that
way.
One can hardly say that there are perceptible stages in Mr Abercrombie's
thought. He is one of the few poets with no crudities to repent, either
artistic or philosophic. Yet there is a poem in his first volume, a
morality called "The New God"; and there is another piece called "The
Sale of St Thomas," first published in 1911, which are relatively
simple. Here he is content to take material that is traditional, both to
poetry and religion, and infuse into it so much of modern significance
as it will carry. The first re-tells the mediæval legend of a girl
changed by God into his own likeness in order to save her from violence.
There is, apt to our present study, but too long to give in full, at
least one passage that is magnificent in conception and imagery alike.
It is the voice of God, answering the girl's prayer that she may be
saved by the destruction of her beauty. The voice declares that the
petition is sweet and shall be granted, that he will quit the business
of the universe, that he will "put off the nature of the world," and
become
God, when all the multitudinous flow
Of Being sets backward to Him; God, when He
Is only glory....
The "Sale of St Thomas" also treats a legend, with originality and
power. This remarkable poem is already well known: but one may at least
call attention to the fitness and dignity with which the poet has placed
the modern gospel upon the lips of the Christ. Thomas has been
intercepted by his master, as he is about to run away for the second
time from his mission to India.
Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear;
Easily may a man crouch down for fear,
And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face
The hailing storm of the world with graver courage.
But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin,
And one that groweth deep into a life,
With hardening roots that clutch about the breast.
For this refuses faith in the unknown powers
Within man's nature; shrewdly bringeth all
Their inspiration of strange eagerness
To a judgment bought by safe experience;
Narrows desire into the scope of thought.
But it is written in the heart of man,
Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire.
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;
.....
But send desire often forth to scan
The immense night which is thy greater soul;
Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul,
Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being,
And of created purpose reach the ends.
Perhaps the thought here is not so simple as the pellucid expression
makes it to appear: yet the conventional material on which the poet is
working restrains it to at least relative simplicity. When, however,
his inspiration is moving quite freely, unhampered by tradition either
of technique or of theme, the result is more complex and more
characteristic.
The tragedy called "Blind", in his first volume, is an example. The plot
of this dramatic piece is probably unique. If one gave the bald outline
of it, it might seem to be merely a story of crude revenge. It is
concerned with rude and outlawed people: it springs out of elemental
passions--fierce love turned to long implacable hatred, and then
reverting to tenderness and pity and overwhelming remorse. And yet there
are probably no subtler studies in poetry than the three persons of this
little drama--the woman who has reared her idiot son to be the weapon to
avenge her wrongs upon the father he has never known: the blind son
himself; and his father, the same fiddling tramp whom we have already
noted. There are points in the delineation of all three which are very
brilliantly imagined: the change in the woman when she meets at last the
human wreck who had once been her handsome lover: the idiot youth
hungering to express the beauty which is revealed to him, through touch,
in a child's golden hair, the warmth of fire, the mysterious presence of
the dark:
... like a wing's shelter bending down.
I've often thought, if I were tall enough
And reacht my hand up, I should touch the soft
Spread feathers of the resting flight of him
Who covers us with night, so near he seems
Stooping and holding shadow over us,
Roofing the air with wings. It's plain to feel
Some large thing's near, and being good to us.
But, above all, there is the character of the fiddler. At first glance,
the phenomenon looks common enough and all its meaning obvious. "A
wastrel" one would say, glibly defining the phenomenon; and add "a
_drunken_ wastrel," believing that we had explained it. But the poet
sees further, apprehends more and understands better. Drunken indeed,
but an intoxication older and more divine than that of brandy began the
business; and much brandy had not quenched the elder fire. It flamed in
him still, mostly a sinister glow, fed from his bad and sorrowful past,
but leaping on occasion to fair radiance, as in the talk with his
unknown son, when some magnetic influence drew the two blind men
together and made them friends before they had any knowledge of
relationship. Of the many finer touches in this poem, none is more
delicate and none more moving than the suggestion of unconscious
affinity between these two: the idiot, with his half-awake mind,
groping amidst shadows of ideas which to the older man are quick with
inspiration.
SON. What are words?
TRAMP. God's love! Here's a man after my own heart;
We must be brothers, lad.
But besides his dramatic and psychological interest, the fiddler is
important because he seems to represent the poet's philosophy in its
brief iconoclastic phase. For we find placed in his lips a destructive
satire of the old theological doctrine of Good and Evil. The passage is
too long to quote, and it would be unfair to mutilate it. Incidentally
we may note, however, the keen salt humour of it, and how that quality
establishes the breadth and sanity of the poet's outlook. The point of
peculiar interest at the moment is that this phase passes with the
particular poem--an early one; and thenceforward it is replaced by more
constructive thought. We come to "The Fool's Adventure," for instance,
and find the "Seeker" travelling through all the regions of mind and
spirit to find God, and the nature and cause of sin. His quest brings
him first to the Self of the World, and he believes that this is God.
But the Sage corrects him:
... Poor fool,
And didst thou think this present sensible world
Was God?...
.....
It is a name, ...
The name Lord God chooses to go by, made
In languages of stars and heavens and life.
And when, finally, he has won through to a certain palace at the "verge
of things," he cries his question to the unseen king within.
SEEKER. Then thou art God?
WITHIN. Ay, many call me so.
And yet, though words were never large enough
To take me made, I have a better name.
SEEKER. Then truly, who art thou?
WITHIN. I am Thy Self.
Another aspect of the same idea, caught in a more lyrical mood, will be
found in the poem called "The Trance." The poet is standing upon a
hill-side alone at night, watching the "continual stars" and overawed by
the vastness and "fixt law" of the universe. Then, in a sudden
revelation of perhaps a fraction of a minute:
I was exalted above surety
And out of time did fall.
As from a slander that did long distress,
A sudden justice vindicated me
From the customary wrong of Great and Small.
I stood outside the burning rims of place,
Outside that corner, consciousness.
Then was I not in the midst of thee
Lord God?
.....
That, however, is the triumphant ecstasy of a moment. More often he is
preoccupied with the duality in human nature, and in "An Escape" there
is a fine simile of the struggle:
Desire of infinite things, desire of finite.
... 'tis the wrestle of the twain makes man.
--As two young winds, schooled 'mong the slopes and caves
Of rival hills that each to other look
Across a sunken tarn, on a still day
Run forth from their sundered nurseries, and meet
In the middle air....
And when they close, their struggle is called Man,
Distressing with his strife and flurry the bland
Pool of existence, that lay quiet before
Holding the calm watch of Eternity.
The incidence of finite and infinite is felt with equal force: sense is
as powerful as spirit, and therein of course lives the keenness of the
strife. In "Soul and Body" there is a passage--only one of many,
however--in which the rapture of sensuous beauty is expressed. The
spirit is imagined to be just ready to put off sense, to be for ever
caught out of "that corner, consciousness." And the body reminds it:
Thou wilt miss the wonder I have made for thee
Of this dear world with my fashioning senses,
The blue, the fragrance, the singing, and the green.
.....
Great spaces of grassy land, and all the air
One quiet, the sun taking golden ease
Upon an afternoon:
Tall hills that stand in weather-blinded trances
As if they heard, drawn upward and held there,
Some god's eternal tune;
We may take our last illustration of this subject from a passage at the
end of the volume called _Emblems of Love_. It is from a poem so rich in
beauty and so closely wrought, that to quote from it is almost
inevitably to do the author an injustice. But the same may be said about
the whole book: while single poems from it will disclose high individual
value, both as art and philosophy, their whole effect and meaning can
only be completely seized by reading them as a sequence, and in the
light of the conception to which they all contribute.
The book is designed to show, in three great movements representing
birth, growth, and perfection, the evolution of the human spirit in the
world. The spirit, which is here synonymous with love, is traced from
the instant which is chosen to mark its birth (the awakening sense of
beauty in primitive man), through its manifold states of excess and
defect, up to a transcendent union which draws the dual powers into a
single ecstasy. The greatness of the central theme is matched by the
dignity of its presentment, while the dramatic form in which it is
embodied saves it from mere abstraction. We see the dawn of the soul in
the wolf-hunter, suddenly perceiving beauty in nature and in women: the
vindication of the soul by Vashti, magnificently daring to prove that it
is no mere vassal to beauty: and the perfecting of the soul in the
terrible paradox of Judith's virginity. But it is in one of the closing
pieces, called fittingly "The Eternal Wedding," that the poet attains
the summit of his thought along these lines; prefiguring the ultimate
union of the conflicting powers of life in one perfect rapture.
... I have
Golden within me the whole fate of man:
That every flesh and soul belongs to one
Continual joyward ravishment ...
That life hath highest gone which hath most joy.
For like great wings forcefully smiting air
And driving it along in rushing rivers,
Desire of joy beats mightily pulsing forward
The world's one nature....
... so we are driven
Onward and upward in a wind of beauty,
Until man's race be wielded by its joy
Into some high incomparable day,
Where perfectly delight may know itself,--
No longer need a strife to know itself,
Only by its prevailing over pain.
That is the topmost peak that his philosophy has gained--for just so
long as to give assurance that it exists. But no one supposes that he
will dwell there: it is altogether too high: the atmosphere is too rare.
It was reached only by the concentration of certain poetical powers,
chiefly speculative imagination, which carried him safely over the
chasms of a lower altitude. But when other powers are in the ascendant,
as for instance in _The End of the World_: when he is recalled to
actuality by that keen eye for fact which is so rare a gift to genius of
this type, the terror of those lower chasms is revealed. Here is one of
the characters reflecting on the thought of the end of the world, which
he believes to be imminent from an approaching comet:
Life, the mother who lets her children play
So seriously busy, trade and craft,--
Life with her skill of a million years' perfection
To make her heart's delighted glorying
Of sunlight, and of clouds about the moon,
Spring lighting her daffodils, and corn
Ripening gold to ruddy, and giant seas,
And mountains sitting in their purple clothes--
O life I am thinking of, life the wonder,
All blotcht out by a brutal thrust of fire
Like a midge that a clumsy thumb squashes and smears.
That passage will serve to point the single comment on technique with
which this study must close. It has not been selected for the purpose,
and therefore is not the finest example that could be chosen. It is,
however, typical of the blank-verse form which largely prevails in this
poetry, and which, in its very texture, reveals the same extraordinary
combination of qualities which we have observed in the poet's genius.
We have already seen that spiritual vision is here united with
intellectuality as lucid as it is powerful: that the mystic is also the
humanitarian: that imagination is balanced by a good grip on reality;
and that the sense-impressions are fine as well as exuberant. We have
seen, too, that this diversity and apparent contrast, although resulting
in an art of complex beauty, do not tend towards confusion or obscurity.
There has been a complete fusion of the elements, and the molten stream
that is poured for us is of glowing clarity.
Exactly the same feature is discernible in the style of this verse. Look
at the last passage for a moment and consider its effect. It is
impossible to define in a single word, because of its complexity. The
mind, lingering delightedly over the metaphor of life the mother, is
suddenly awed by the magnitude of the idea which succeeds it. The
æsthetic sense is taken by the light and colour of the middle lines, and
then, as if the breath were caught on a half-sob, a wave of emotion
follows, pensive at first, but rising abruptly to a note that is as
rough as a curse. There are more shades of thought, lightly reflective
or glooming with prescience; and there are more degrees of emotion, from
tenderness to wrath, than we have time to analyze. The point for the
moment is the manner in which they are conveyed, and the adequacy of the
instrument to convey them.
The texture of the verse itself will provide evidence of this. Here are
barely a dozen lines of our English heroic verse; and they will be found
to contain the maximum of metrical variety. Probably only two, or at
most three of them (it depends upon scansion, of course) are of the
regular iambic pentameter: that is to say, built up strictly from the
iamb, which is the unit of this form. All the others are varied by the
insertion at some point in the line, and frequently at two or three
points, of a different verse-unit, dactyl, anapæst, trochee or spondee;
and no two lines are varied in exactly the same way.
But, besides the range of the instrument, there is the exquisite harmony
of it with mood or idea. The strong down-beat of the trochee summons the
intellect to consider a thought: the dactyl will follow with the quick
perception of a simile: the iamb will punctuate rhythm: anacrusis will
suggest the half-caught breath of rising emotion, and turbulent feeling
will pour through spondee, dactyl, and anapæst. And so with the diction.
Just as we find a measure which is both vigorous and light, precise and
flexible, easily bending law to beauty; so in the language there is a
corresponding union of strength and grace, homeliness and dignity. Could
a great conception be stated in a simpler phrase than that of the two
first lines?
Life, the mother who lets her children play
So seriously busy, trade and craft--
and yet this phrase, simple and lucid as it is, conveys a sense of
boundless tenderness and pity, playing over the surface of a deeper
irony. Doubtless its strength and clarity come from the fact that each
word is of the common coin of daily life; but its atmosphere, an almost
infinite suggestiveness of familiar things brooded over in a wistful
mood, comes partly at least through the colloquial touch.
Mr. Abercrombie has no fear to be colloquial, when that is the proper
garment of his thought, the outer symbol of the inner reality. Nor is he
the least afraid of fierce and ugly words, when they are apt. The last
line of our passage illustrates this. Taken out of its setting, and
considering merely the words, one would count a poet rash indeed who
would venture such a harsh collocation. But repeat the line aloud, and
its metrical felicity will appear at once: put it back in its setting,
as the culmination of a wave of feeling that has been gathering strength
throughout: remember the idea (of beauty annihilated by senseless law
and blind force), which has kindled that emotion; and then we shall
marvel at the art which makes the line a growl of impotent rage.
All of which is merely to say that the spirit of this poetry has evolved
for itself a living body, wearing its beauty delightedly, rejoicing in
its own vitality, and unashamed either of its elemental impulse or its
transcendent vision.
Rupert Brooke
_Born at Rugby on August 3, 1887;
Died at Lemnos an April 23, 1915_
Probably most English people who love their country and their country's
greatest poet have at some time taken joy to identify the spirit of the
two. England and Shakespeare: the names have leapt together and flamed
into union before the eyes of many a youngster who was much too dazzled
by the glory to see how and whence it came. But returning from a
festival performance on some soft April midnight, or leaning out of the
bedroom window to share with the stars and the wind the exaltation which
the play had evoked, the revelation suddenly shone. And thenceforward
April 23 was by something more than a coincidence the day both of
Shakespeare and St George.
Reason might come back with the daylight to rule over fancy; and the
cool lapse of time might remove the moment far enough to betray the
humour of it. But the glow never quite faded; or if it did it only gave
place to the steadier and clearer light of conviction. One came to see
how the poet, by reason of his complete humanity, stood for mankind;
and how, from certain sharp characteristics of our race, he stood
pre-eminently for English folk. And coming thence to the narrower but
firmer ground of historical fact, one saw how shiningly he represented
the Elizabethan Age, with its eager, inquisitive, and adventurous
spirit; its craving to fulfil to the uttermost a gift of glorious and
abundant life.
Now precisely in that way, though not of course in the same superlative
degree, one may see Rupert Brooke standing for the England of his time.
And when this poet died at Lemnos on April 23, 1915, those who knew and
loved his work must have felt the tragic fitness of the date with the
event. If the gods of war had decreed his death, they had at least
granted that he might pass on England's day. In him indeed was
manifested the poetic spirit of the race, warm with human passion and
sane with laughter: soaring on wings of fire but nesting always on the
good earth. And though one does not claim to find in him the highest
point or the extremest advance to which the thought of his day had gone,
he stands pre-eminently for that day in the steel-clear light of his
gallant spirit.
The title of Rupert Brooke's posthumous book--_1914_--signifies that
moment of English history which is reflected in his work. He is the
symbol of that year in a double sense. He represents the calamitous
political event of it in his voluntary service to the State, and the
manner of his death. Thus by the accident of circumstance which made him
eminent and vocal, he serves to speak for the silent millions of English
men and women who splendidly sprang to duty. But in his poetry there is
a closer and deeper relation to that tragic year. Incomplete as it may
be: youthful and prankish as some of it is, the thought and manner of
the time are imaged there. A certain level of humane culture had been
reached, a certain philosophy of life had been evolved, and a definite
attitude to reality taken. Lightly but clearly, these things which
reflect the colour of our civilization at August 1914 are crystallized
in Rupert Brooke's poetry to that date. But at that point the image,
like the whole order of which it was the reflection, was shattered by
the crash of arms; and the few poems which he wrote subsequently are
preoccupied with the spiritual crisis which the war precipitated.
Most of the admirers of this poet have seen only in his last pieces the
singular identity of his spirit with the spirit of his country. And that
is so noble a concord that it cannot be missed. For when England plunged
into the greatest war of history, she flung off in the act several
centuries of her age. Priceless things, slowly and patiently acquired,
went overboard as mere impedimenta; but in the relapse, the slipping
backward to an earlier time and consequent recovery of youth, with its
ardour and passion, its recklessness and generosity and courage, the
optimist saw a reward for all that was lost. So with the poetry of
Rupert Brooke. Those few last sonnets, as it were the soul of
rejuvenated England, seem to the same hopeful eye a complete
compensation, not only for the wasted individual life, but for the
beauty and significance of the age for which he stood, now irrevocably
lost.
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
Before that renunciation one can only stand with bowed head, realizing
perhaps more clearly than the giver did, the splendour of the gift. But
he too, this representative of his age, knew the value of the life that
he was casting away. It was indeed to him a "red sweet wine," precious
for the "work and joy" it promised, and the sacred seed of immortality.
It is this, above all, that his poetry signifies: a rich and exuberant
life, keenly conscious of itself, and fully aware of the realities by
which it is surrounded. Its nature grows from that--sensuous and
_spirituelle_, passionate and intellectual, ingenuous and ironic, tragic
and gay. Never before--no, not even in Donne, as some one has
suggested--was such intensity of feeling coupled with such merciless
clarity of sight: mental honesty so absolute, piercing so fierce a flame
of ardour.
From the fusion of those two powers comes the distinctive character of
this poetry: the peculiar beauty of its gallant spirit. They are
constant features of it from first to last, but they are not always
perfectly fused nor equally present. In the earlier poems, to find which
you must go back to the volume of 1911 and begin at the end of the book,
they enter as separate and distinct components. One would expect that,
of course, at this stage; and we shall not be surprised, either, if we
discover that there is here a shade of excess in both qualities: a
touch of self-consciousness and relative crudity. The point of interest
is that they are so clearly the principal elements from which the subtle
and complex beauty of the later work was evolved. Thus, facing one
another on pages 84 and 85, are two apt examples. In "The Call" sheer
passion is expressed. The poet's great love of life, taking shape for
the moment as love of his lady, is here predominant.
Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.
I broke the Night's primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!
.....
I'll break and forge the stars anew,
Shatter the heavens with a song;
Immortal in my love for you,
Because I love you, very strong.
But on the opposite page, the sonnet called "Dawn" swings to the
extremest point from the magniloquence of that. It is realistic in a
literal sense: a bit of wilful ugliness. Yet it springs, however
distortedly, from the root of mental clarity and courage which was to
produce such gracious blossoming thereafter. It is engaged with an
exasperated account of a night journey in an Italian train: all the
discomfort and weary irritation of it venting itself upon two
unfortunate Teutons.
.....
One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again.
The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain
Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere
A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air
Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before....
Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.
It is not long, however, before we find that the two elements are
beginning to combine; and we soon meet, astonishingly, with the third
great quality of the poet's genius. It is strange that imagination
always has this power to surprise us. No matter if we have taught
ourselves that poetry cannot begin to exist without it: no matter how
watchful and alert we think we are, it will spring upon us unaware,
taking possession of the mind with amazing exhilaration. That is
especially true of the quality as it is found in Rupert Brooke's poetry.
For, however you have schooled yourself, you do not expect imaginative
power of the first degree to co-exist with sensuous joy so keen, and so
acute an intelligence. Yet in a piece called "In Examination" the
miracle is wrought. This, too, is an early poem, which may be the reason
why one can disengage the threads so easily; whilst a notable fact is
that the delicate fabric of it is woven directly out of a commonplace
bit of human experience. The poet is engaged with a scene that is
decidedly unpromising for poetical treatment--all the stupidity of
examination, with its dull, unhappy, "scribbling fools."
Lo! from quiet skies
In through the window my Lord the Sun!
And my eyes
Were dazzled and drunk with the misty gold,
.....
And a full tumultuous murmur of wings
Grew through the hall;
And I knew the white undying Fire,
And, through open portals,
Gyre on gyre,
Archangels and angels, adoring, bowing,
And a Face unshaded ...
Till the light faded;
And they were but fools again, fools unknowing,
Still scribbling, blear-eyed and stolid immortals.
There are at least two poems, "The Fish" and "Dining-Room Tea," in which
imaginative power prevails over every other element; and if imagination
be the supreme poetic quality, these are Rupert Brooke's finest
achievement. They are, indeed, very remarkable and significant examples
of modern poetry, both in conception and in treatment. In both pieces
the subjects are of an extremely difficult character. One, that of "The
Fish," is beyond the range of human experience altogether; and the other
is only just within it, and known, one supposes, to comparatively few.
The imaginative flight is therefore bold: it is also lofty, rapid, and
well sustained. In "The Fish" we see it creating a new material world,
giving substance and credibility to a strange new order of sensation:
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
.....
But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run.
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.
We see, all through this poem (and the more convincingly as the whole of
it is studied) the "fundamental brain-stuff": the patient constructive
force of intellect keeping pace with fancy every step of the way. So,
too, with "Dining-Room Tea." Imagination here is busy with an idea that
is wild, elusive, intangible: on the bare edge, in fact, of sanity and
consciousness. It is that momentary revelation, which comes once in a
lifetime perhaps, of the reality within appearance. It comes suddenly,
unheralded and unaccountable: it is gone again with the swiftness and
terror of a lightning-flash. But in the fraction of a second that it
endures, æons seem to pass and things unutterable to be revealed. Only a
poet of undoubted genius could re-create such a moment, for on any lower
plane either imagination would flag or intellect would be baffled, with
results merely chaotic. And only to one whose quick and warm humanity
held life's common things so dear could the vision shine out of such a
homely scene. But therein Rupert Brooke shows so clearly as the poet of
his day: that through the familiar joys of comradeship and laughter:
through the simple concrete things of a material world--the "pouring tea
and cup and cloth," Reality gleams eternal.
When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too,
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
.....
Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter....
Till suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked upon your innocence.
For lifted clear and still and strange
From the dark woven flow of change
Under a vast and starless sky
I saw the immortal moment lie.
One instant I, an instant, knew
As God knows all. And it and you
I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
In witless immortality.
But the precise characteristic of this poetry is not one or other of
these individual gifts. It is an intimate and subtle blending of them
all, shot through and through with a gallant spirit which resolutely
and gaily faces truth. From this brave and clear mentality comes a sense
of fact which finds its artistic response in realism. Sometimes it will
be found operating externally, on technique; but more often, with truer
art, it will wed truth of idea and form, in grace as well as candour.
From its detachment and quick perception of incongruity comes a rare
humour which can laugh, thoughtfully or derisively, even at itself. It
will stand aside, watching its own exuberance with an ironic smile, as
in "The One Before the Last." It will turn a penetrating glance on
passion till the gaudy thing wilts and dies. It will pause at the height
of life's keenest rapture to call to death an undaunted greeting:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
--"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
--And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Perception so keen and fearless, piercing readily through the
half-truths of life and art, has its own temptation to mere cleverness.
Thence come the conceits of the sonnet called "He Wonders Whether to
Praise or Blame Her," a bit of the deftest juggling with ideas and
words. Thence, too, the allegorical brilliance of the "Funeral of
Youth"; and the merry mockery of the piece called "Heaven." This is an
excellent example of the poet's wit, as distinct from his richer, more
pervasive, humour. It is very finely pointed and closely aimed in its
satire of the Victorian religious attitude. And if we put aside an
austerity which sees a shade of ungraciousness in it, we shall find it a
richly entertaining bit of philosophy:
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto Mud!--Death eddies near--
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
.....
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.