we please, recapture our own childhood as we wander with him through his
enchanted garden. And if it be true, as John Masefield says, that "the
days that make us happy make us wise," it is blessed wisdom that should
be ours at the end of our ramble. For see what a delightful place it is!
Not one of your opulent, gorgeous gardens, with insolently well-groomed
lawns and beds that teem with precious nurselings; but a much homelier
region, and one of more elusive and delicate charm. Boundaries there
are, for order and safe going, but they are hidden away in dancing
foliage: and there are leafy paths which seem to wind into infinity, and
corners where mystery lurks.
Some one is always sitting there,
In the little green orchard;
.....
When you are most alone,
All but the silence gone ...
Some one is waiting and watching there,
In the little green orchard.
Flowers grow in the sunny spaces, and all the wild things that children
love--primrose and pimpernel, darnel and thorn;
Teasle and tansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;
Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme....
It is mostly a shadowy place however, not chill and gloomy, but arched
with slender trees, through whose thin leafage slant the warm fingers of
the sun, picking out clear, quickly-moving patterns upon the grass. The
air is soft, the light is as mellow as a harvest moon, and the sounds of
the outer world are subdued almost to silence. Nothing loud or strenuous
disturbs the tranquility: only the remote voices of happy children and
friendly beasts and kind old people. Wonder lives here, but not fear;
smiles but not laughter; tenderness but not passion. And the presiding
genius of the spot is the poet's "Sleeping Cupid," sitting in the shade
with his bare feet deep in the grass and the dew slowly gathering upon
his curls: a cool and lovesome elf, softly dreaming of beauty in a quiet
place.
So one might try to catch into tangible shape the spirit of this poetry,
only to realize the impossibility of doing anything of the kind. But
mere analysis would be equally futile; for the essence of it is as
subtle as air and as fluid as light; and one is finally compelled, in
the hope of conveying some impression of the nature of it, to fall back
upon comparison. It is a clumsy method however, frequently doing
violence to one or both of the poets compared; and even when used
discreetly, it often serves only to indicate a more or less obvious
point of resemblance. But we must take the risk of that for the moment,
and call out of memory the magical effect that is produced upon the mind
by the reading of "Kubla Khan," or "Christabel" or "The Ancient
Mariner." Very similar to that is the effect of Mr. de la Mare's poetry.
There is a difference, and its implications are important; but the chief
fact is that here, amongst this modern poetry of so different an order,
you find work which seems like a lovely survival from the age of
romance.
That is why one has the feeling that this poet has never grown up.
Partly from a natural inclination, and partly from a deliberate plan
(like that of Coleridge) to produce a certain kind of art, he has
created a faëry, twilight world, a world of wonder and fantasy, which is
the home of perpetual youth. He has never really lost that time when, as
a little boy, he says that he listened to Martha telling her stories in
the hazel glen. Martha, of 'the clear grey eyes' and the 'grave, small,
lovely head' is surely a veritable handmaid of romance:
'Once ... once upon a time ...'
Like a dream you dream in the night,
Fairies and gnomes stole out
In the leaf-green light.
And her beauty far away
Would fade, as her voice ran on,
Till hazel and summer sun
And all were gone:--
All fordone and forgot;
And like clouds in the height of the sky,
Our hearts stood still in the hush
Of an age gone by.
That hush, invoking a sense of remoteness in space and time, lies over
all his work. It is as though, walking in the garden of this verse, a
child flitted lightly before us with a finger raised in a gesture of
silence. And it is not for nothing that his principal book is called
_The Listeners_. Footfalls are light, and voices soft, and the wind is
gentle: the noise of life is filtered to a whisper or a rustle or a
sleepy murmur. It is a device, of course, as we quickly see if we peer
too curiously at it: just a contrivance of the romantic artist to create
'atmosphere.' But it is so cunningly done that you never suspect the
contriving; and if you would gauge the skill of the poet in this
direction, you should note that he is able to produce the desired effect
in the broad light of day as well as in shadow and twilight. It is a
more difficult achievement, and much rarer. Evening is the time that the
poets generally choose to work this particular spell: though moonlight
or starlight, dawn, sunset, and almost any degree of darkness will serve
them. Sunlight alone, wide-eyed, penetrating and inquisitive, is
inimical to their purpose. Yet Mr de la Mare, in a poem called "The
Sleeper," succeeds in spinning this hush of wondering awe out of the
full light of a summer day. A little girl (Ann, a charming and familiar
figure in this poetry: at once a symbol of childhood and a very human
child) runs into the house to her mother, and finds her asleep in her
chair. That is all the 'plot'; and it would be hard to find an incident
slighter, simpler and more commonplace. But out of this homespun
material the poet has somehow conjured an eerie, brooding, impalpable
presence which steals upon us as it does upon the child in the quiet
house until, like her, we want to creep quickly out again.
A sense of the supernatural, that constant component of the romantic
temperament, is of the essence of this poetry. The manifestation of it
is something more than a trick of technique, for it has its origin in
the very nature of the poet's genius. In its simpler and more direct
expression, it seems to spring out of the fearful joy which this type of
mind experiences in contact with the strange and weird. Again, as in
"The Witch," it may take the form of a bit of pure fantasy, transmitting
the fascination which has already seized the poet with a lurking smile
at its own absurdity. The opening stanzas tell of a tired old witch who
sits down to rest by a churchyard wall; and who, in jerking off her pack
of charms, breaks the cord and spills them all out on the ground:
And out the dead came stumbling,
From every rift and crack,
Silent as moss, and plundered
The gaping pack.
They wish them, three times over,
Away they skip full soon:
Bat and Mole and Leveret,
Under the rising moon.
Owl and Newt and Nightjar:
They take their shapes and creep,
Silent as churchyard lichen,
While she squats asleep.
.....
Names may be writ; and mounds rise;
Purporting, Here be bones:
But empty is that churchyard
Of all save stones.
Owl and Newt and Nightjar,
Leveret, Bat and Mole
Haunt and call in the twilight,
Where she slept, poor soul.
But in its subtler forms the supernatural element of this poetry is more
complex and more potent. And it would seem to have a definite relation
to the poet's philosophy. Not that it is possible to trace an outline of
systematic thought in work like this, where every constituent is milled
and sifted to exquisite fineness and fused to perfect unity. But if we
follow up a hint here and there, and correlate them with the author's
prose fiction, we shall not be able to escape the suggestion of a
mystical basis to the elusive witchery of so many of his poems. We shall
see it to be rooted in an extreme sensitiveness to what are called
'psychic' influences: a sensitiveness through which he becomes, at one
end of the scale, acutely aware of the presence of a surrounding spirit
world; and at the other, deeply sympathetic and tender to subhuman
creatures.
No crude claim is made on behalf of any mystical creed; and still less
would one violate the fragile and mysterious charm of a poem like "The
Listeners" by so-called interpretation. But placed beside "The Witch,"
it is clearly seen to treat the supernatural on a higher plane: it is,
indeed, a piece of rare and delicate symbolism. There is no recourse to
the ready appeal of the grotesque and the marvellous; and although we
find here all the 'machinery' of a sensational poem in the older
romantic manner--the great empty house standing lonely in the forest,
moonlight and silence, and a traveller knocking unheeded at the door--it
is a very subtle blending of those elements which has gone to produce
the peculiar effect of this piece. Twice the traveller knocks, crying:
"Is there anybody there?" but no answer comes:
... only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Running through the piece--and more clearly perceived when the whole
poem is read--is the thread of melancholy which is inseparably woven
into all the poet's work of this kind. And it, too, was a gift of his
fairy-godmother when he was born, light in texture as a gossamer and
spun out of the softest silk. Melancholy is almost too big a word to fit
the thing it is, for there is no gloom in it. It is like the silvery,
transparent cloud of thoughtfulness which passes for a moment over a
happy face; and it has something of the youthful trick of playing with
the idea of sadness. Hence come the early studies of "Imogen" and
"Ophelia," where the poet is so much in love with mournfulness that he
revels in making perfect phrases about it.
Can death haunt silence with a silver sound?
Can death, that hushes all music to a close,
Pluck one sweet wire scarce-audible that trembles,
As if a little child, called Purity,
Sang heedlessly on of his dear Imogen?
But even when this verse approaches a degree nearer to the reality of
pain it is still, as it were, a reflected emotion; and there is no
poignance in it. It is a winning echo of sorrowfulness, caught by one
who has the habit of turning back to listen and look. Thus the studies
of old age which we sometimes find here are drawn in the true romantic
manner, with a sunset halo about them, and lightly shadowed by
wistfulness and faint regret. And the thought of death, when it is
allowed to enter, comes as caressingly as sleep. The little poem called
"All That's Past," where the poet is thinking of how far down the roots
of all things go, is only one example of many where melancholy is toned
to the faintest strain of pensive sweetness:
Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the briar's boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are--
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
.....
Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve's nightingales;
We walk and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.
So we might continue to cull passages which represent one aspect or
another of the specific quality of Mr de la Mare's poetry. The choice is
embarrassingly rich, for there is remarkable unity of tone and technical
perfection here. But there is a danger in the process, especially with
work of so fine a grain; and one feels bound to repeat the warning that
it is impossible to dissect its ultimate essence in this way. We can
only come back to our comparison, and recalling the magical music of
poems like "Arabia," "Queen Djenira," or "Voices"--in which all the
characteristics noted are so intimately blended that it is impossible to
disengage them--reiterate the fact that they possess the same
inexplicable charm as the romantic work of Coleridge.
But that reminds us of the difference, and all that it implies. For,
after all, this poet is a romanticist of the twentieth century, and not
of the late eighteenth. It is true that his genius has surprisingly kept
its youth (even more, that is to say, than the poet usually does); but
it is a nonage which is clearly of this time and no other. The signs of
this are clear enough. First and foremost, there is his humanity--in
which perhaps all the others are included, and with which are certainly
associated the simplicity and sincerity of his diction. It is as though
the two famous principles on which the _Lyrical Ballads_ were planned
had in the fulness of time become united in the creative impulse of a
single mind. That is not to charge Mr de la Mare with the combined
weight of those two earlier giants, of course, but simply to observe the
truth which Rupert Brooke expressed so finely when he said that the
poetic spirit was coming back "to its wider home, the human heart." So
that even a born romanticist like this cannot escape; and into the
chilly enchantment of an older manner warm sunlight streams and fresh
airs blow.
Obvious links with the life-movement of his time are not lacking, though
as mere external evidence they are relatively unimportant. Of such are
the synthesis of poetry and science in "The Happy Encounter"; and the
detachment suggested in "Keep Innocency," where the poet reveals a full
consciousness of the gulf between romance and reality. But the influence
goes deeper than that. It is because he is a child of his age that he
has observed children so lovingly, and has wrought child-psychology into
his verse with such wonderful accuracy. That also is why he calls so
gently out of 'thin-strewn memory' such a homely figure as the shy old
maid in her old-fashioned parlour; and thence, too, comes the sympathy
with toiling folk--considering them characteristically in the serene
mood when their work is done--which underlies such pieces as "Old
Susan" and "Old Ben":
Sad is old Ben Thistlewaite,
Now his day is done,
And all his children
Far away are gone.
He sits beneath his jasmined porch,
His stick between his knees,
His eyes fixed vacant
On his moss-grown trees.
.....
But as in pale high autumn skies
The swallows float and play,
His restless thoughts pass to and fro,
But nowhere stay.
Soft, on the morrow, they are gone;
His garden then will be
Denser and shadier and greener,
Greener the moss-grown tree.
From the same humane temper come the poet's kindly feeling for animals
and his affectionate understanding of them. Over and over again its
positive aspect finds expression, either quaint, comical or tender. And
twice at least the negative side of it appears, coming as near to rage
at the wanton destruction of animal life as so mellow and balanced a
nature would ever get. It is a significant fact that at such moments he
takes refuge in his humour--that humour, at once rich and delicate,
which is perhaps the most precious quality of this poetry, and which,
growing from a free and sympathetic contact with life, holds the scale
counterpoised to a nicety against the glamorous romantic sense. Thus we
have this scrap of verse, lightly throwing off a mood of disgust in
whimsical idiom:
I can't abear a Butcher,
I can't abide his meat,
The ugliest shop of all is his,
The ugliest in the street;
Bakers' are warm, cobblers' dark,
Chemists' burn watery lights;
But oh, the sawdust butcher's shop,
That ugliest of sights!
And thus in "Tit for Tat" we find this apostrophe to a certain Tom
Noddy, just returning from a day of 'sport' with his gun over his
shoulder:
Wonder I very much do, Tom Noddy,
If ever, when you are a-roam,
An Ogre from space will stoop a lean face,
And lug you home:
Lug you home over his fence, Tom Noddy,
Of thorn-stocks nine yards high,
With your bent knees strung round his old iron gun
And your head dan-dangling by:
And hang you up stiff on a hook, Tom Noddy,
From a stone-cold pantry shelf,
Whence your eyes will glare in an empty stare,
Till you are cooked yourself!
The humour there, corresponding in degree to the indignation for which
it is a veil, is relatively broad. There are many subtler forms of it,
however, and one will be found in a charming piece which is apt to our
present point. It is called "Nicholas Nye," and tells about an old
donkey in an orchard. He is an unprepossessing creature, lame and
worn-out: just a bit of animal jettison, thrown away here to end his
days in peace. And the poet had a great friendship with him:
But a wonderful gumption was under his skin,
And a clear calm light in his eye,
And once in a while: he'd smile:--
Would Nicholas Nye.
Seem to be smiling at me, he would,
From his bush in the corner, of may,--
Bony and ownerless, widowed and worn,
Knobble-kneed, lonely and grey;
And over the grass would seem to pass
'Neath the deep dark blue of the sky,
Something much better than words between me
And Nicholas Nye.
_Wilfrid Wilson Gibson_
There are a dozen books by this author, the work of about a dozen years.
They began to appear in 1902; and they end, so far as the present survey
is concerned, with poems that were published in the first half of 1914.
They make a good pile, a considerable achievement in bulk alone; and
when they are read in sequence, they are found to represent a growing
period in the poet's mind and art which corresponds to, and epitomises,
the transition stage out of which English poetry is just passing. That
is to say, in addition to the growth that one would expect--the ripening
and development which would seem to be a normal process--there has
occurred an unexpected thing: a complete change of ideal, with steady
and rapid progress in the new direction. So that if Mr. Gibson's later
books were compared directly with the early ones, they might appear to
be by an entirely different hand. Place _Urlyn the Harper_--which was
first published--beside a late play called _Womenkind_ or a still more
recent dramatic piece called _Bloodybush Edge_; and the contrast will be
complete. On the one hand there is all the charm of romance, in material
and in manner--but very little else. On the other hand there is nothing
to which the word charm will strictly apply; an almost complete
artistic austerity: but a profound and powerful study of human nature.
On the one hand there is a dainty lyrical form appropriate to the theme:
there are songs like this one, about the hopeless love of the minstrel
for the young queen who is mated with an old harsh king:
I sang of lovers, and she praised my song,
The while the King looked on her with cold eyes,
And 'twixt them on the throne sat mailèd wrong.
I sang of Launcelot and Guenevere,
While in her face I saw old sorrows rise,
And throned between them cowered naked Fear.
I sang of Tristram and La Belle Isoud,
And how they fled the anger of King Mark
To live and love, deep sheltered in a wood.
Then bending low, she spake sad voiced and sweet,
The while grey terror crouched between them stark,
"Sing now of Aucassin and Nicolete."
The later work cannot be so readily illustrated: it is at once subtler
and stronger, and depends more upon the effect of the whole than upon
any single part. But for the sake of the contrast we may wrest a short
passage out of its setting in _Bloodybush Edge_. A couple of tramps have
met at night on the Scottish border; one is a cockney Londoner, a bad
lot with something sinister about him and a touch of mystery. He has
just stumbled out of the heather on to the road, cursing the darkness
and the loneliness of the moor. The other, a Border man to whom night is
beautiful and the wild landscape a familiar friend, protests that it is
not dark, that the sky is 'all alive with little stars':
TRAMP. ... Stars!
Give me the lamps along the Old Kent Road;
And I'm content to leave the stars to you.
They're well enough; but hung a trifle high
For walking with clean boots. Now a lamp or so....
DICK. If it's so fine and brave, the Old Kent Road,
How is it you came to leave it?
TRAMP. ... I'd my reasons ...
But I was scared: the loneliness and all;
The quietness, and the queer creepy noises;
And something that I couldn't put a name to,
A kind of feeling in my marrow-bones,
As though the great black hills against the sky
Had come alive about me in the night,
And they were watching me; as though I stood
Naked, in a big room, with blind men sitting,
Unseen, all round me, in the quiet darkness,
That was not dark to them. And all the stars
Were eyeing me; and whisperings in the heather
Were like cold water trickling down my spine:
Putting an early and a late book side by side in this way, the contrast
is astonishing. And it is not an unfair method of comparison, because
when the new ideal appears it strikes suddenly into the work, and
sharply differentiates it at once from all that had been written before.
Like the larger movement which it so aptly illustrates, the change is
conscious, deliberate, and full of significance; and it is the cardinal
fact in this author's poetical career. It marks the stage at which he
came to grips with reality: when he brought his art into relation with
life: when the making of poetic beauty as an end in itself could no
longer content him; and the social conscience, already prompting
contemporary thought, quickened in him too.
Humanity was the new ideal: humanity at bay and splendidly fighting. It
appeared first in the two volumes of 1907 as dramatic studies from the
lives of shepherd-folk. Four books had preceded these, in which the
texture of the verse was woven of old romance and legend. Another book
was yet to come, _The Web of Life_, in which the prettiness of that kind
of romanticism would blossom into absolute beauty. But the new impulse
grew from the date of _Stonefolds_; and when the first part of _Daily
Bread_ appeared, the impulse had become a reasoned principle. In the
poem which prefaces that volume it comes alive, realizing itself and
finding utterance in terms which express much more than an individual
experience. I quote it for that reason. The immediate thought has
dignity and the personal note is engaging. There is, too, peculiar
interest in the clarity and precision with which it speaks, albeit
unconsciously, for the changing spirit in English poetry. But the final
measure of the poem is the touch of universality that is latent within
it. For here we have the expression of not only a law of development by
which the poet must be bound, and not only a poetical synthesis of the
most important intellectual movement of this generation, but an
experience through which every soul must pass, if and when it claims its
birthright in the human family.
As one, at midnight, wakened by the call
Of golden-plovers in their seaward flight,
Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fall
Through tingling silence of the frosty night--
Who lies and listens, till the last note fails,
And then, in fancy, faring with the flock
Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales,
Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock;
And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned
Within the mightier music of the deep,
No more remembers the sweet piping sound
That startled him from dull, undreaming sleep:
So I, first waking from oblivion, heard,
With heart that kindled to the call of song,
The voice of young life, fluting like a bird,
And echoed that light lilting; till, ere long,
Lured onward by that happy, singing-flight,
I caught the stormy summons of the sea,
And dared the restless deeps that, day and night,
Surge with the life-song of humanity.