the basis it has in fact--of the schemes which are afoot in the Isle
for afforestation--one cannot help wondering whether it was consciously
suggested by them. Not that there need be the slightest relation, of
course. The poetical soul will often take a leap in the dark and reach a
shining summit long before the careful people who travel by daylight
along beaten tracks are half way up the hill. Still, there is proof that
this group of writers is keenly interested in the question of the land
and the organized effort to reclaim it. It is the more practical form of
their patriotism, and the sign by which one knows it for something more
than a sentiment. It is a deeply rooted and reasoned sense that the
well-being of a nation, and therefore its strength and greatness, come
ultimately from the soil and depend upon the close and faithful relation
of the people to it. That surely is the conviction which underlies the
work of a poet like Mr Padraic Colum, and particularly such a piece as
his "Plougher":
Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage, earth broken;
Beside him two horses--a plough!
Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn-man there in the
sunset,
And the Plough that is twin to the Sword, that is founder of cities!
.....
Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with the savage;
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth only above
them.
A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and the height up
to heaven,
And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots, purples
and splendours.
In closing this study we must take a glance at two recent volumes, one
containing the poetry of Mr Seumas O'Sullivan and the other Mr Cousins'
latest work. Mr O'Sullivan's book is curiously interesting, inasmuch as
it unites certain contrasted qualities which are found separately in the
other poets we have been considering. Thus, this poet is 'literary' in
the sense of knowing and loving good books, in his familiarity with the
old literature of his country, and in the fact that those things have
had a palpable influence upon him. Temperamentally he is an artist, with
the artistic instinct to subordinate everything to the beauty of his
work. But he is also like the more 'popular' poets in his lyrical gift
and in the range and depth of his sympathies; so that his collected
poems of 1912 may be regarded in some degree as an epitome of modern
Irish poetry. There you will find work which indicates that its author
might have lived very happily in a visionary world of æsthetic delight.
He might have chosen always to sing about gods and heroes and fair
ladies with "white hands, foam-frail." But, just as clearly, you will
see that he has been aroused from dreams. Vanishing remnants of them are
perceptible in such a piece as "The Twilight People"; and when they are
gone, in that serene moment before complete awakening, when the light is
growing and the birds call and a fresh air blows, you get a piece like
"Praise":
Dear, they are praising your beauty,
The grass and the sky:
The sky in a silence of wonder,
The grass in a sigh.
I too would sing for your praising,
Dearest, had I
Speech as the whispering grass,
Or the silent sky.
These have an art for the praising
Beauty so high.
Sweet, you are praised in a silence,
Sung in a sigh.
Then comes the awakening, sudden and sharp, with an impulse to spring
out and away from those old dreams of myth and romance:
Bundle the gods away:
Richer than Danaan gold,
The whisper of leaves in the rain,
The secrets the wet hills hold.
A spiritual adventure seems to be implied in the poem from which this
fragment is taken, similar to that which Mr Cousins has recorded in
"Straight and Crooked." It is the call of reality: the impulse which is
drawing the poetic spirit closer and closer to life, and bidding it seek
inspiration in common human experience. Thus when we find Mr O'Sullivan
invoking the vision of earth we soon discover that 'earth' means
something more to him than 'countryside'--the beauty of Nature and of
pastoral existence. It comprises also towns and crowded streets and busy
people; and it seems to mean ultimately any aspect of human existence
which has the power to induce poetic ecstasy. An infinitely wider range
is thus open to the poet, and though this little volume does not pretend
to cover any large part of it, there are pieces which suggest its almost
boundless possibility. Let us put two of them together. The first, "A
Piper," describes a little street scene:
A Piper in the streets to-day
Set up, and tuned, and started to play,
And away, away, away on the tide
Of his music we started; on every side
Doors and windows were opened wide,
And men left down their work and came,
And women with petticoats coloured like flame
And little bare feet that were blue with cold,
Went dancing back to the age of gold,
And all the world went gay, went gay,
For half an hour in the street to-day.
That expresses the rapture which is evoked directly by the touch of the
actual. The next piece, a fragment from "A Madonna," is equally
characteristic; but its inspiration came through another art, a picture
by Beatrice Elvery:
Draw nigh, O foolish worshippers who mock
With pious woe of sainted imagery
The kingly-human presence of your God.
Draw near, and with new reverence gaze on her.
See you, these hands have toiled, these feet have trod
In all a woman's business; bend the knee.
For this of very certainty is she
Ordained of heavenly hierarchies to rock
The cradle of the infant carpenter.
Under the diverse sources from which such poems immediately spring,
there flows the current which is fertilizing, in greater or less degree,
all modern poetry. It has been running strongly in England for some
years, but hitherto the Irish poet has hardly seemed conscious of it,
though it was visibly moving him. Its presence has been mainly felt in
the silence of Mr Yeats, whose lovely romanticism fell dumb at its
touch. But, significantly, the latest poetic utterance of Ireland is a
cry of complete realization. It has remained for Mr Cousins, more
sensitive and complex than his compatriots, to hear the call of his age
more consciously than they; and it is left to him, in grace and courage,
to declare it:
... From a sleep I emerge. I am clothed again with this woven
vesture of laws;
But I am not, and never again shall be the man that I was.
At the zenith of life I am born again, I begin.
Know ye, I am awake, outside and within.
I have heard, I have seen, I have known; I feel the bite of this
shackle of place and name,
And nothing can be the same.
.....
I have sent three shouts of freedom along the wind.
I have struck one hand of kinship in the hands of Gods, and one in
the hands of women and men.
I am awake. I shall never sleep again.
_Rose Macaulay_
There is one small volume of poems by Miss Macaulay, called _The Two
Blind Countries_. It is curiously interesting, since it may be regarded
as the testament of mysticism for the year of its appearance, nineteen
hundred and fourteen. That is, indeed, the most important fact about it;
though no one need begin to fear that he is to be fobbed off with
inferior poetry on that account. For the truth is that the artistic
value of this work is almost, if not quite, equal to the exceptional
power of abstraction that it evinces. Poetry has really been achieved
here, extremely individual in manner and in matter, and of a high order
of beauty.
One is compelled, however, though one may a little regret the
compulsion, to start from the fact of the poet's mystical tendency. Not
that she would mind, presumably; the title of her book is an avowal,
clear enough at a second glance, of its point of view. But the reader
has an instinct, in which the mere interpreter but follows him, to
accept a poem first as art rather than thought; and if he examine it at
all, to begin with what may be called its concrete beauty. I will not
say that the order is reversed in the case of Miss Macaulay's poetry,
since that would be to accuse her of an artistic crime of which she is
emphatically not guilty. But it is significant that the greater number
of pieces in this book impress the mind with the idea they convey,
simultaneously with the sounds in which it is expressed. And as the idea
is generally adventurous, and sometimes fantastic, it is that which
arrests the reader and on which he lingers, at any rate long enough to
discover its originality.
But though the mystical element of the work is suggested in its very
title, one discovers almost as early that it is mysticism of a new kind.
It belongs inalienably to this poet and is unmistakably of this age. The
world of matter, this jolly place of light and air and colour and human
faces, is vividly apprehended; but it is seen by the poet to be ringed
round by another realm which, though unsubstantial, is no less real.
Indeed, so strong is her consciousness of that other realm, and its
presence so insistently felt, that sometimes she is not sure to which of
the two she really belongs. In the first poem of the book, using the
fictive 'he' as its subject, she indicates her attitude to that region
beyond sense. In the physical world, this 'blind land' of 'shadows and
droll shapes,' the soul is an alien wanderer. Constantly it hears a
'clamorous whisper' from the other side of the door of sense, coming
from the
... muffled speech
Of a world of folk.
But no cry can reach those others: no clear sight can be had of them,
and no intelligible word of theirs can come back.
Only through a crack in the door's blind face
He would reach a thieving hand,
To draw some clue to his own strange place
From the other land.
But his closed hand came back emptily,
As a dream drops from him who wakes;
And naught might he know but how a muffled sea
In whispers breaks.
.....
On either side of a gray barrier
The two blind countries lie;
But he knew not which held him prisoner,
Nor yet know I.
This poem may be said to state the theme of the whole book. It would
appear, however, that in the difficult feat of giving form to thought so
intangible, the poet has attained here a detachment which is almost
cold. But it would be unfair to judge her manner of expression from one
poem; and it happens that there is another piece, built upon a similar
theme, which is much more characteristic. It is called "Foregrounds,"
and here again the two countries are conceived as bordering upon each
other, inter-penetrating, but sharply contrasted as night from day. The
contrast favours a more vivid setting, and the subjective treatment,
admitting deeper emotion, infuses a warmth that "The Alien" lacked.
Moreover, the psychic region is here called simply the _dream-country_;
and, presented in the delicate suggestion of a moonlit night, it hints
only at the lure of the mystery, and nothing of its terror. Throughout
the poem, too, runs exuberant joy in common earthly things, in the
beauty of nature and in human feeling; and this is followed, in the
closing lines of each stanza, by an afterthought and a touch of
melancholy: reflection coming, in the most natural way, close upon the
heels of emotion. Thus the first lines revel in the glory of spring; and
then, almost audibly, the tone drops to the lower level of one who
perceives that glory as the veil of something beyond it.
The pleasant ditch is a milky way,
So alight with stars it is,
And over it breaks, like pale sea-spray,
The laughing cataract of the may
In luminous harmonies.
(Cloak with a flower-wrought veil
The face of the dream-country.
The fields of the moon are kind, are pale,
And quiet is she.)
Thus, too, in the third stanza, the recurrent idea of an alien spirit is
caught into imagery which glows with light and colour: imagery so simple
and sensuous as almost to mock abstraction and quite to disguise it; but
bearing at its heart the essence of a philosophy. Again the soul is
imagined as standing at the barrier of the two countries, when reality
has melted to an apparition and the sense of that other realm has grown
acute. Bereft of the comfortable earth, but powerless still to enter the
dream-country: standing lonely and fearful at the cold verge of the
mystic region, the spirit will seek to draw about it the garment of
appearance:
I will weave, of the clear clean shapes of things,
A curtain to shelter me;
I will paint it with kingcups and sunrisings,
And glints of blue for the swallow's wings,
And green for the apple-tree.
(Oh, a whisper has pierced the veil
Out of the dream-country,
As a wind moans in the straining sail
Of a ship lost at sea.)
In reading this poem, and in others too, one is struck by the hold
which the real world has upon our poet. It is a surprising fact in one
of so speculative a turn, and is the clearest sign by which we recognize
her work as of our time and no other. Her thought may be projected very
far, but her feet are generally upon solid ground. Perhaps I ought
rather to say that they are always there; for it is more than probable
that bed-rock may exist in two or three poems where I have been unable
to get down to it. It is in any case safe to say that a sense of
reality--shown in human sympathy and tenderness for lowly creatures, in
love of nature and perception of beauty, in truth to fact, in a touch of
shrewd insight and a sense of humour bred of the habit of detachment--is
very strong. I do not suggest that these qualities are everywhere
apparent. By their nature they are such as could not often enter into
the framework of poems so subtly wrought. But they are woven into the
texture of the poet's mentality, and have even directed its method. So
that, remote as may be the idea upon which she is working, it is
generally brought within the range of sight; and, intangible though it
may seem, it is given definite and charming shape. And if there were not
one obvious proof of this steady anchorage, we might have happy
assurance of it in the clarity and precision of her thought. But
fortunately there _is_ obvious proof. There is, for instance, this
delicious passage in the poem from which I have just quoted, surely
proving a kinship with our own 'blind country' as close as with that
other and something dearer:
The jolly donkeys that love me well
Nuzzle with thistly lips;
The harebell is song made visible,
The dandelion's lamp a miracle,
When the day's lamp dips and dips.
There are, too, a sonnet called "Cards" and the very beautiful longer
poem, "Summons," in which the glow of human love makes of the
supernatural a mere shadow. In "Cards" the scene is a 'dim
lily-illumined garden,' and four people are playing there by candle
light. But out of the darkness which rings the circle of flickering
light sinister things creep, menacing the frail life of one of the
players.
But, like swords clashing, my love on their hate
Struck sharp, and drove, and pushed.... Grimly round you
Fought we that fight, they pressing passionate
Into the lit circle which called and drew
Shadows and moths of night.... I held the gate.
You said, "Our game," more truly than you knew.
Again we perceive this sense of reality in the humour of a poem like
"St Mark's Day" or "Three." It is a quality hearty and cheery in the way
of one who knows all the facts, but has reckoned with them and can
afford to laugh. It has a depth of tone unexpected in an artist whose
natural impulse seems to be towards delicate line and neutral tint; and
there is a tang of salt in it which one suspects of having been added of
intent--as a quite superfluous preservative against sentimentality. "St
Mark's Day" is very illuminating in this respect, and in the bracing
sanity under which mere superstition wilts. The village girl, teased by
neighbours into believing that her spectre was seen the night before and
that therefore she must die within the year, is a genuine bit of rustic
humanity. No portrait of her is given; but in two or three strong
touches she stands before us, plump, rosy and rather stupid; hale enough
to live her fourscore years, but sobbing in foolish fright as her sturdy
arms peg the wet linen upon the line.
I laughed at her over the sticky larch fence,
And said, "Who's down-hearted, Dolly?"
And Dolly sobbed at me, "They saw you, too!"
(And so the liars said they had,
Though I've not wasted paper nor rhymes telling you),
And, "Well," said I, "_I'm_ not sad."
"But since you and me must die within the year,
What if we went together
To make cowslip balls in the fields, and hear
The blackbirds whistling to the weather?"
So in the water-fields till blue mists rose
We loitered, Dolly and I,
And pulled wet kingcups where the cold brook goes,
And when we've done living, we'll die.
The realism of that goes deeper than its technique, and is a notable
weapon in the hands of such an idealist. But in "Three," another
humorous poem, something even more surprising has been accomplished. "St
Mark's Day" is a bit of pure comedy, and might have been written by a
poet for whom _one_ 'blind country' was the beginning and end of all
experience. That is to say, it is interesting as proof of a healthy
grasp on the real world; but the distinctive feature of this poetry
hardly appears in it. Abstraction is absent, inevitably, of course; and
with it that ideal realm which largely preoccupies the poet's thought.
But in "Three," with reality no less strong, with art matching it in
bold and vigorous strokes, and touches here and there positively comic;
with the scene laid out-of-doors in a sunny noonday of August, there is
achieved an almost startling sense of the supernatural. More than that,
it is the supernatural under two different aspects, or on two separate
planes (whichever may be the correct way to state that sort of thing):
the consciousness of a ghostly presence, in the accepted sense of the
spirit of one dead; and that obscure but disturbing awareness of a
hidden life close at hand which most people have experienced at some
time or other. But while the poet has sketched these two of her "Three"
with an equally light hand, smiling amusedly, as it were, at her own
fantasy, she has differentiated them quite clearly. For the true ghost,
conjured out of the stuff of memory, association and the influence of
locality, is a creature of pure imagination. He is not so much described
as suggested, and only dimly felt. There is a stanza devoted to the
Cambridge landscape in the hot noon, and then--
In the long grass and tall nettles
I lay abed,
With hawthorn and bryony
Tangled o'erhead.
And I was alone with Hobson,
Two centuries dead.
Hidden by sprawling brambles
The Nine Waters were;
From a chalky bed they bubbled up,
Clean, green, and fair.
And I was alone with Hobson,
Whose ghost walks there.
But it seems that the poet is not alone with the pleasant ghost of the
old university carrier. There is a third presence near, hidden and
silent, but malign; and the stanzas in which this secret presence grows
to a realization that is acute and almost terrifying, are remarkably
done. They illustrate this poet's ability to create illusion out of mere
scraps of material, and those of the most commonplace kind; and they
rely for their verbal effect upon the homeliest words. Yet the
impression of an intangible something that is evil and uncanny is so
strong, that when the very real head of the tramp appears the contrast
provokes a sudden laugh at its absurdity.
And something yawned, and from the grass
A head upreared;
And I was not alone with Hobson,
For at me leered
A great, gaunt, greasy tramp
With a golden beard.
He had a beard like a dandelion,
And I had none;
He had tea in a beer-bottle,
Warm with the sun;
He had pie in a paper bag,
Not yet begun.
The vigorous handling of that passage, and its comical actuality, makes
an excellent foil to the subtler method of presenting the two spirits,
living and dead. And the poem as a whole may be said to reflect the dual
elements which are everywhere present in this work. It is true that in a
more characteristic piece the ideal will prevail over the real. And
consequently, imagination will there be found to weave finer strands,
while thought goes much further afield. Thus, in "Crying for the Moon"
and in "The Thief," one may follow the idea very far; and in both poems
we move in the pale light and dim shadow where mystery is evoked at a
hint. Never, I think, was there such an eerie dawn as that in "The
Thief"; yet never was orchard-joy more keenly realized--
He stood at the world's secret heart
In the haze-wrapt mystery;
And fat pears, mellow on the lip,
He supped like a honey-bee;
But the apples he crunched with sharp white teeth
Were pungent, like the sea.
Probably it is in work like this, where both blind countries find
expression, that Miss Macaulay is most successful. But when she gives
imagination licence to wander alone in the ideal region, it occasionally
seems to go out of sight and sound of the good earth. That happens in
"Completion," a poem which is frankly mystical in theme, symbolism, and
terminology. There is not a touch of reality in it; and neither its fine
strange music, nor glowing colour, nor certain perfect phrases, nor the
language, at once rich and tender and strong, can make it more than the
opalescent wraith of a poem. But perhaps that is just what the author
intended it to be!
In any case "Completion" does correspond to, and daintily express, the
mystical strain which is dominant in this work. It is, however, the
extreme example of it. It stands at the opposite pole from "St Mark's
Day," and antithetical to that, it might have been written by a mystic
for whom the material world was virtually nothing. Moreover, it might
belong to almost any time, or not to time at all; whereas the mysticism
of the book as a whole is peculiarly that of its own author and its own
day. It is individual--a thing of this poet's personality and no
other--in the evidence of a finely sensitive spirit, of a gift of vision
abnormally acute, imaginative power that ranges far and free, and a fine
capacity for abstract thought. But all these qualities, though pervasive
and dominant, are sweetly controlled by a humane temper that has been
nurtured on realities.
Hence comes a duality in which it is, perhaps, not too fanciful to see
a feature of contemporary thought--intensely interested in the region of
ideas, but frankly claiming the material world as the basis and
starting-point of all its speculation. One might put it colloquially
(though without the implied reproach) as making the best of both worlds:
humanity recognizing an honourable kinship with matter, but reaching out
continually after the larger existence which it confidently believes to
be latent in the physical world itself.
A voice may be raised to protest that that is too vaguely generalized;
and if so, the protestant may turn for more precise evidence to such
poems as "Trinity Sunday" and "The Devourers." There he will perceive,
after a moment's reflection, the store of modern knowledge--of actual
data--which has been assimilated to the mystical element here. Let him
consider, for example, the first two stanzas of "The Devourers," and
other similar passages:
Cambridge town is a beleaguered city;
For south and north, like a sea,
There beat on its gates, without haste or pity,
The downs and the fen country.
Cambridge towers, so old, so wise,
They were builded but yesterday,
Watched by sleepy gray secret eyes
That smiled as at children's play.
It is clear that the knowledge really has been assimilated--it is not a
fragmentary or external thing. It is absorbed into the essence of the
work and will not be found to mar its poetic values. But by a hint, a
word, a turn of expression or a mental gesture, one can see that
learning both scientific and humane (a significant union) has gone into
the poetic crucible. There are signs which point to a whole system of
philosophy: there is an historical sense, imaginatively handling the
data of cosmic history; and there are traces which lead down to a basis
in geology and anthropology. Yet these elements are, as I said,
perfectly fused: it would be difficult to disengage them. And inimical
as they may seem to the very nature of mysticism, they are constrained
by this poet to contribute to her vision of a world beyond sense.