the very early work. There is, for example, a group of little poems
called _Faring South_, studied directly from peasant life in the south
of France. They indicate that even at that time an awakening sympathy
with toiling folk had begun to guide his observation; and they are in
any case a very different record of European travel from that of the
mere poetaster. There are studies of a stonebreaker, a thresher, a
ploughman; there is a veracious little picture of a housemother,
returning home at the end of market-day laden, tired and dusty; but
happy to be under her own vine-porch once more. And most interesting of
all the group, there is a shepherd, the forerunner of robuster shepherds
in later books, and evidently a figure which has for this author a
special attraction.
With folded arms, against his staff he stands,
Sun-soaking, rapt, within the August blaze
The while his sheep with moving rustle graze
The lean, parched undergrowth of stubble lands.
Indifferent 'neath the low blue-laden sky
He gazes fearless in the eyes of noon;
And earth, because he craves of her no boon,
Yields him deep-breasted, sun-steeped destiny.
But these characters are not living people, they are types rather than
individuals, and idealized a little. They are, as it were, seen from a
distance, in passing, and in a golden light. Years were to pass before
knowledge and insight could envisage them completely and a dramatic
sense could endow them with life. Meantime the more characteristic
qualities of this early work were to develop independently. The lyrical
power of it, in particular, was to enjoy its flowering time, revelling
in the sweet melancholy of old unhappy love stories, in courts and
rose-gardens, kings and queens, knights and ladies and lute-players.
Perhaps the most charming examples in this kind are "The Songs of Queen
Averlaine." Here are a couple of stanzas from one of them, in which the
queen is brooding sadly over the thought of her lost love and lost
youth:
Spring comes no more for me: though young March blow
To flame the larches, and from tree to tree
The green fire leap, till all the woodland, glow--
Though every runnel, filled to overflow,
Bear sea-ward, loud and brown with melted snow,
Spring comes no more for me!
.....
Spring comes no more for me: though May will shake
White flame of hawthorn over all the lea,
Till every thick-set hedge and tangled brake
Puts on fresh flower of beauty for her sake;
Though all the world from winter-sleep awake,
Spring comes no more for me!
They are graceful songs, and their glamour will not fail so long as
there remain lovers to read them. The critic is disarmed by their
ingenuousness: he is constrained to take them as they stand, with their
warmth and colour, their sweet music and the occasional flashes of
observed truth (like the March runnels of this poem) which redeem them
from total unreality. The reward lies close ahead. For even on this
theme of love, and still in the lyric mood, sanity soon triumphs. It
heralds its victory with a laugh, and the air is lightened at once from
the scented gloom of romanticism. "Sing no more songs of lovers dead,"
it cries, sound and strong enough now to make fun of itself.
We are no lovers, pale with dreams,
Who languish by Lethean streams.
Upon our bodies warm day gleams;
And love that tingles warm and red
From sole of foot to crown of head
Is lord of all pale lovers dead!
The volume from which that stanza is taken, _The Web of Life_, contains
this poet's finest lyrics. From the standpoint of art nothing that he
has done--and he is always a scrupulous artist--can surpass it; and the
seeker whose single quest is beauty, need go no further down the list of
Mr Gibson's works. There are some perfect things in the book: poems like
"Song," "The Mushroom Gatherers" and "The Silence," in which the early
grace and felicity survive; and where the lyric ecstasy is deepened by
thought and winged by emotion. In one sense, therefore, although this
volume is only midway through the period we are concerned with, it has
attained finality. We ought to pause on it. We see that it culminates
and closes the 'happy singing-flight' with which this career began. We
realize, too, that it has absolute value, as poetry, by virtue of which
many a good judge might rank it higher than its remarkable successors.
And, indeed, it is hard to break away from its spell. But when we judge
_The Web of Life_ relatively, when we place it back in the proper niche
amongst its kindred volumes, its importance seems suddenly to dwindle.
Beside the later books, it grows almost commonplace; we perceive its
charm to be of the conventional kind of the whole order of regular
English poetry to which it belongs. That is to say, though there is no
sign that the work has been directly modelled upon the accredited poets
of an earlier generation, it has characteristics which relate it to them
and secure a place in the line of descent. There are pieces which remind
us of Keats or the younger Tennyson. Here is a stanza from the poem
called "Beauty" which might have been the inspiration of the whole book:
With her alone is immortality;
For still men reverently
Adore within her shrine:
The sole immortal time has not cast down,
She wields a power yet more divine
Than when of old she rose from out the sea
Of night, with starry crown.
Though all things perish, Beauty never dies.
Or there are poems in which passion trembles under a fine restraint, as
in "Friends":
Yet, are we friends: the gods have granted this.
Withholding wine, they brimmed for us the cup
With cool, sweet waters, ever welling up,
That we might drink, and, drinking, dream of bliss.
.....
O gods, in your cold mercy, merciless,
Heed lest time raze your thrones; and at the sign,
The cool, sweet-welling waters turn to wine;
The spark to day, and dearth to bounteousness.
And there is the group of classical pieces at the end of the book, in
which one regretfully passes over the flexible blank-verse of "Helen in
Rhodos" and "The Mariners," to choose a still more characteristic
passage from "A Lament for Helen":
Helen has fallen: she for whom Troy fell
Has fallen, even as the fallen towers.
O wanderers in dim fields of asphodel,
Who spilt for her the wine of earthly hours,
With you for evermore
By Lethe's darkling shore
Your souls' desire shall dwell.
.....
But we who sojourn yet in earthly ways;
How shall we sing, now Helen lieth dead?
Break every lyre and burn the withered bays,
For song's sweet solace is with Helen fled.
Let sorrow's silence be
The only threnody
O'er beauty's fallen head.
But this book, which is so good an example of poetic art in the older
English manner, is not Mr Gibson's distinguishing achievement. That
came immediately afterwards, and was the outcome of the changed ideal
which we have already noted. _The Web of Life_ may be said to belong to
a definite school--though to be sure its relation to that school is in
affinity rather than actual resemblance. The books which follow have no
such relation: they stand alone and refuse to be classified, either in
subject or in form. And while the earlier work would seem to claim its
author for the nineteenth century, in _Daily Bread_ he is new-born a
twentieth-century poet of full stature.
The most striking evidence of the change is in the subject-matter.
_Daily Bread_, like _Fires_, is in three parts, and each of them
contains six or seven pieces. There is thus a total of about forty
poems, every one of which is created out of an episode from the lives of
the working poor. Thus we find a young countryman, workless and
destitute in a London garret, joined by his village sweetheart who
refuses to leave him to starve alone. A farm labourer and his wife are
rising wearily in the cold dawn to earn bread for the six sleeping
children. There are miners and quarrymen in some of the many dangers of
their calling, and their womenfolk enduring privation, suspense and
bereavement with tireless courage. There is a stoker, dying from burns
that he has sustained at the furnace, whose young wife retorts with
passionate bitterness to a hint of compensation:
Money ... woman ... money!
I want naught with their money.
I want my husband,
And my children's father.
Let them pitch all their money in the furnace
Where he ...
I wouldn't touch a penny;
'Twould burn my fingers.
Money ...
For him!
There are fishermen in peril of the sea; the printer, the watchman, the
stonebreaker, the lighthousekeeper, the riveter, the sailor, the
shopkeeper; there are school-children and factory girls; outcasts,
tramps and gipsies; and a splendid company of women--mothers in
childbirth and child-death, sisters, wives and sweethearts--more heroic
in their obscure suffering and toil than the noblest figure of ancient
tragedy. With deliberate intention, therefore, the poet has set himself
to represent contemporary industrial life: the strata at the base of our
civilization. He has, as it were, won free at a leap from illusion, from
a dominant idealism, and the jealous, tyrannical instinct for mere
beauty. Life is the inspiration now, and truth the objective. The facts
of the workers' lives are carefully observed, realized in all their
significance and faithfully recorded. Sympathy and penetration go hand
in hand. Personal faults and follies, superstitions and vices, play
their part in these little dramas, no less than the social wrongs under
which the people labour. And the conception, in its balance and
comprehensiveness, is really great; for while on the one hand there is
an humiliating indictment of our civilization (implicit, of course, but
none the less complete) on the other hand there is a proud vindication
of the invincible human spirit.
Viewed steadily thus, by a poetic genius which has subdued the
conventions of its art, such themes are shown to possess a latent but
inalienable power to exalt the mind. They are therefore of the genuine
stuff of art, needing only the formative touch of the poet to evoke
beauty. And thus we find that although the normal process seems to have
been reversed here: although the poet has sought truth first--in event,
in character and in environment--beauty has been nevertheless attained;
and of a type more vital and complete than that evoked by the statelier
themes of tradition.
As might have been expected the new material and method have directly
influenced form; and hence arises another distinction of these later
works. The three parts of _Daily Bread_ and the play called _Womenkind_
are the extreme example; and their verse is probably unique in English
poetry. It has been evolved out of the actual substance on which the
poet is working; directly moulded by the nature of the life that he has
chosen to present. The poems here are dramatic; and whether the element
of dialogue or of narrative prevail, the language is always the living
idiom of the persons who are speaking. It is nervous, supple, incisive:
not, of course, with much variety or colour, since the vocabulary of
such people could not be large and its colour might often be too crude
for an artist's use. Selection has played its part, in words as in
incidents; but although anything in the nature of dialect has been
avoided, we are convinced as we read that this is indeed the speech of
labouring folk. We can even recognize, in a light touch such as an
occasional vocative, that they are the sturdy folk of the North country.
There is a dialogue called "On the Road" which illustrates that, as well
as more important things. Just under the surface of it lies the problem
of unemployment: a young couple forced to go on tramp, with their infant
child, because the husband has lost his job. That, however, inheres in
the episode: it is not emphasized, nor even formulated, as a problem.
The appeal of the poem is in its fine delineation of character, the
interplay of emotion, the rapid and telling dialogue--the pervasive
humanitarian spirit; and, once again, an exact and full perception of
the woman's point of view. Mr Gibson is a poet of his time in this as
well--in his large comprehension and generous acknowledgment of the
feminine part in the scheme of things. I do not quote to illustrate
that, because it is an almost constant factor in his work. But I give a
passage in which the Northern flavour is distinctly perceptible, in
addition to qualities which are limited to no locality--the kindliness
of the poor to each other and their native courtesy. An old stonebreaker
has just passed the starving couple by the roadside and, divining the
extremity they are at, he turns back to them:
Fine morning, mate and mistress!
Might you be looking for a job, my lad?
Well ... there's a heap of stones to break, down yonder.
I was just on my way ...
But I am old;
And, maybe, a bit idle;
And you look young,
And not afraid of work,
Or I'm an ill judge of a workman's hands.
And when the job's done, lad,
There'll be a shilling.
.....
Nay, but there's naught to thank me for.
I'm old;
And I've no wife and children,
And so, don't need the shilling.
.....
Well, the heap's down yonder--
There, at the turning.
Ah, the bonnie babe!
We had no children, mistress.
And what can any old man do with shillings,
With no one but himself to spend them on--
An idle, good-for-nothing, lone old man?
The curious structure of the verse is apparent at a glance--the
irregular pattern, the extreme variation in the length of the line, the
absence of rhyme and the strange metrical effects. It is a new poetical
instrument, having little outward resemblance to the grace and dignity
of regular forms. Its unfamiliarity may displease the eye and the ear at
first, but it is not long before we perceive the design which controls
its apparent waywardness, and recognize its fitness to express the life
that the poet has chosen to depict. For it suggests, as no rhyme or
regular measure could, the ruggedness of this existence and the
characteristic utterance of its people. No symmetrical verse, with its
sense of something complete, precise and clear, could convey such an
impression as this--of speech struggling against natural reticence to
express the turmoil of thought and emotion in an untrained mind. Mr
Gibson has invented a metrical form which admirably produces that
effect, without condescending to a crude realism. He has made the worker
articulate, supplying just the coherence and lucidity which art demands,
but preserving, in this irregular outline, in the plain diction and
simple phrasing, an acute sense of reality. Here is a fragment of
conversation, one of many similar, in which this verse is found to be a
perfect medium of the idea. A wife has been struck by her husband in a
fit of passion: she has been trying to hide from her mother the cause of
the blow, but she is still weak from the effects of it and has not lied
skilfully. Her mother gently protests that she is trying to screen her
husband:
Nay! There's naught to screen.
'Twas I that ... Nay!
And, if he's hot, at times,
You know he's much to try him;
The racket that he works in, all day long,
Would wear the best of tempers.
Why, mother, who should know as well as you
How soon a riveter is done?
The hammers break a man, before his time;
And father was a shattered man at forty;
And Philip's thirty-five;
And if he's failed a bit ...
And, sometimes, over-hasty,
Well, I am hasty, too;
You know my temper; no one knows it better.
Occasionally, it is true, the principle on which the verse is built is
too strictly applied: the phraseology is abrupt beyond the required
effect; and the lines, instead of following a rule which seems to
measure their length by a natural pause, are broken arbitrarily.
Speaking broadly, however, it is beautifully fitted to the themes of
_Daily Bread_, though one is not so sure about it in a poem like "Akra
the Slave." This is a delightful narrative, akin in subject to the
earlier work, and belonging to that period much more than to the date at
which it was published, 1910. One cannot linger upon it, nor even upon
the more important work which followed, and is happily still
continuing--more important because it indicates development and marked
progress along the new lines. The three parts of _Fires_ carry forward
the conception of _Daily Bread_, but now in narrative style, permitting
therefore a relaxation of the austere dramatic truth of the dialogue
form. The verse is modified accordingly, as will be seen in this passage
from "The Shop": A workman has entered his favourite shop--the little
general-store of a poor neighbourhood--to buy his evening paper. But he
is not attended to immediately; and a sickly little girl who has come
for a fraction of a loaf and a screw of tea, is also waiting. The
shopkeeper is engrossed with a parcel from the country--from a little
convalescent son who has gone for the first time to his father's native
place:
Next night, as I went in, I caught
A strange, fresh smell. The postman had just brought
A precious box from Cornwall, and the shop
Was lit with primroses, that lay atop
A Cornish pasty, and a pot of cream:
And as, with gentle hands, the father lifted
The flowers his little son had plucked for him,
He stood a moment in a far-off dream,
As though in glad remembrances he drifted
On Western seas: and, as his eyes grew dim,
He stooped, and buried them in deep, sweet bloom:
Till, hearing, once again, the poor child's cough,
He served her hurriedly, and sent her off,
Quite happily, with thin hands filled with flowers.
And, as I followed to the street, the gloom
Was starred with primroses; and many hours
The strange, shy flickering surprise
Of that child's keen, enchanted eyes
Lit up my heart, and brightened my dull room.
Music has come in again, in frequent and sometimes intricate rhyme; in
metrical lightness and variety; in a fuller and more harmonious
language. The spirit of this later work remains humanitarian, but it is
not concentrated now solely upon the tragic aspects of the workers'
lives. A wider range is taken, and comedy enters, with an accession of
urbanity from which characterization gains a mellower note. The world of
nature, too, banished for a time in the exclusive study of humanity,
returns to enrich this later poetry with a store of loving observation,
an intimate knowledge of wild creatures, and the refreshing sense of a
healthful open-air life in which, over a deep consciousness of sterner
things, plays a jolly comradeship with wind and weather.
_Ralph Hodgson_
The format of Mr Hodgson's published work is almost as interesting as
the poetry itself--and that is saying a good deal. For all of his poetry
that matters (there is an earlier, experimental volume which is not
notable) has been issued during the past two or three years in the form
of chapbook and broadside.
It was a new publishing venture, quietly launched _At the Sign of Flying
Fame_, and piloted now through the rapids of a larger success by the
Poetry Bookshop. In a sense, of course, it is not a new thing at all,
but a revival of the means by which ballad and romance were conveyed
into the hands of the people a couple of centuries ago. Yet it is no
imitation of a quaint style for the sake of its picturesqueness, nor the
haphazard choice of a vehicle unsuited either to the author or his
public, nor a mere bid for popular favour.
The peculiar interest of the revival lies in the fact that it is part of
the larger movement, the renascent spirit of poetry which has been
visibly stirring the face of the waters in these past few years. The
reappearance of the chapbook synchronized with that, and is closely
related with it. For it is found to be as well fitted to the form and
the content of the newest poetry as it is suited to the need of the
newest audience. On the one hand it brings to the freshly awakened
public a book which is cheap enough to acquire and small enough readily
to become a familiar possession of the mind. On the other hand, it is
suited perfectly to the simple themes and metrical effects of the work
hitherto published in this form; and is designed only to include small
poems of unquestioned excellence. Here may be perceived the more
important factors which go to the formation of literary taste; and while
one would estimate that the educational value of these little books is
therefore high, aptly meeting the need of the novice in poetry, it is
clear that the discriminating mind also is likely to find them
satisfying.
Mr Hodgson's work, then, will be found in four chapbooks and a thin
sheaf of broadsides. The chapbooks are small and slim, and could all be
picked up between the thumb and finger of one hand. They are wrapped in
cheery yellow and decorated with impressionistic sketches which, nine
times out of ten, perhaps, really help the illusion that the poet is
creating. The broadsides--there are about a dozen of them--are long
loose sheets, each containing a single poem similarly decorated.
The sum of the work is thus quite small. Perhaps there are not more than
five-and-twenty pieces altogether, none very long, and amongst them an
occasional miniature of a single stanza. Probably the format in which
the author has chosen to appear has had an effect in restricting his
production. That would be a possible result of the vigorous selection
exercised and the limits imposed in space and style. But there are signs
that he would not have been in any case a ready writer--the sense these
lyrics convey of having waited on inspiration until the veritable moment
shone, finding thought and feeling, imagination and technique, ripe to
express it. And by those very signs watchers knew and acclaimed this
author for a poet, despite the slender bulk of his accomplishment, long
before the Royal Society of Literature had awarded to his work the
_Polignac_ prize.
The two poems which gained the prize are "The Bull" and "The Song of
Honour." Each occupies a whole chapbook to itself, and therefore must be
accounted, for this poet, of considerable length. They are, indeed, the
most important of his poems. And if one does not immediately add that
they are also the most beautiful and the most charming, the reason is
something more than an aversion from dogma and the superlative mood.
For the artistic level of all this work is high, and it would be
difficult, on a critical method, to single out the finest piece. The
decision would be susceptible, even more than poetical judgments usually
are, to mood and individual bias. One person, inclining to the smaller,
gem-like forms of verse, will find pieces by Mr Hodgson to flatter his
fancy. This poet has, indeed, a gift of concentrated expression, before
which one is compelled to pause. There are tiny lyrics here which
comprise immensities. The facile imp that lurks round every corner for
the poor trader in words whispers 'epigram' as we read "Stupidity
Street" or "The Mystery" or "Reason has Moons." But is the specific
quality of these delicate creations really epigrammatic? No, it would
appear to be something more gracious and more subtly blent with emotion;
having implications that lead beyond the region of stark thought, and an
impulse far other than to sharpen a sting. "Stupidity Street" is an
example:
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
Analysis of that will discover an anatomy complete enough to those who
enjoy that kind of dissection. There are bones of logic and organic heat
sufficient of themselves for wonder how the thing can be done in so
small a compass. And the strong simple words, which articulate the idea
so exactly, confirm the impression of something rounded and complete; as
though final expression had been reached and nothing remained behind.
But as a fact there is much behind. One sees this perhaps a little more
clearly in "The Mystery":
He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,
He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.
I did not pray Him to lay bare
The mystery to me,
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
And His own face to see.
Again the idea has been crystallized so cleanly out of the poetic matrix
that one sees at first only its sharp, bright outline. Perhaps to the
analyst it would yield nothing more. But the simpler mind will surely
feel, no matter how dimly, the presence of all the imaginings out of
which it sprang, a small synthesis of the universe.