implies, it is in two movements. But though every stanza has a lightsome
grace which makes it lovely in itself--though the whole chain, if broken
up, would yield as many gems as there are stanzas, irregular in size and
shape indeed, but each shining and complete--the great beauty of the
poem is its beauty as a whole. It would seem a reproach to imperil that.
Yet there is a culminating passage of extreme significance to which we
must come directly for the crowning word of the poet's philosophy. From
that we may take a fragment now, if only to observe the reach of its
imagination and to win some sense which the poem conveys of limitless
spiritual range.
Reach up my wings!
Now broaden into space and carry me
Beyond where any lark that sings
Can get:
Into the utmost sharp tenuity,
The breathing-point, the start, the scarcely-stirred
High slenderness where never any bird
Has winged to yet!
The moon peace and the star peace and the peace
Of chilly sunlight: to the void of space,
The emptiness, the giant curve, the great
Wide-stretching arms wherein the gods embrace
And stars are born and suns....
There follows hard upon that what is in effect a confession of faith. It
is not explicitly so, of course. Subjective this poet may be--is it not
a virtue in the lyricist?--but he does not confide his religion to us in
so many words. He has an artistic conscience. But the avowal, though it
is by way of allegory and grows up out of the imagery of the poem as
naturally as a blossom from its stem, is clear enough. And is supported
elsewhere, implicitly, or by a mental attitude, or outlined now and then
in figurative brilliance. There can be no reason to doubt its strength
and its sincerity--and there is every reason to rejoice in it--for it
reveals Mr Stephens as a poet of the future.
One pauses there, realizing that the term may mean very much--or nothing
at all. It may even suggest a certain technical vogue which, however
admirable in the theory of its originators, apparently is not yet
justified in the creation of manifest beauty. Our poet has no
association with that, of course, except in that he shares the general
impulse of the poetic spirit of his generation. That is, quite clearly,
to escape from the tyranny of the past in thought and word and metrical
form; and therein he is at one with most of the poets in this book. We
may grant that it is an important exception: that the movement which is
indicated here may be the sober British version of its more daring
Italian counterpart. Yet there remains still a difference wide enough
and deep enough to disclaim any technical relationship.
The root of the matter lies there, however. In Mr Stephens what we may
call the poetic instinct of the age works not merely to escape from the
past, but to advance into the future--and it has become a conscious,
reasoned hope in human destiny. It does not with him so much influence
the form of the work as it directs the spirit of it. And that spirit is
an absolute and impassioned belief in the future of mankind. Therein he
stands contrasted with many of the younger English poets, and with his
own compatriots. With many of his compeers the escape has been into
their own time, and the noblest thing evolved from that is a grave and
tender social conscience. Some, of course, have not escaped at all, and
have no wish to do so. Their work has its own soft evening loveliness.
But whilst Mr Yeats lives delicately in a romantic past, whilst poor
Synge lived tragically in a sardonic present, this poet stands on his
hill of vision and cries to the world the good tidings of a promised
land. Here it is, from the closing passage of "A Prelude and a Song":
There the flower springs,
Therein does grow
The bud of hope, the miracle to come
For whose dear advent we are striving dumb
And joyless: Garden of Delight
That God has sowed!
In thee the flower of flowers,
The apple of our tree,
The banner of our towers,
The recompense for every misery,
The angel-man, the purity, the light
Whom we are working to has his abode;
Until our back and forth, our life and death
And life again, our going and return
Prepare the way: until our latest breath,
Deep-drawn and agonized, for him shall burn
A path: for him prepare
Laughter and love and singing everywhere;
A morning and a sunrise and a day!
_Margaret L. Woods_
About one half of the poetry in Mrs Woods' collected edition is dramatic
in character. There are two plays in regular form, tragedies both. One,
_Wild Justice,_ is in six scenes which carry the action rapidly forward
almost without a break. The other, called _The Princess of Hanover_, is
in three acts, which move with a wider sweep through the rise,
culmination, and crisis of a tragic story. These two dramas, which are
powerfully imagined and skilfully wrought, are placed in a separate
section at the end of the book--quite the best wine thus being left to
finish the feast.
Fine as they are, however, the plays do not completely represent the
poet's dramatic gift. And when we note the comic elements of two or
three pieces which are tucked away in the middle of the volume, we may
admit a hope that Mrs Wood may be impelled on some fair day to attempt
regular comedy. There is, for instance, the fun of the delightful medley
called "Marlborough Fair." Here are broad humour and vigorous, hearty
life which smells of the soil; little studies of country-folk,
incomplete but vivid; scraps of racy dialogue, and the prattle of a
child, all interwoven with the grotesquer fancies of a fertile
imagination, endowing even the beasts and inanimate objects of the show
with consciousness and speech. Hints there are in plenty (though to be
sure they are in some cases no more than hints) that the poet's dramatic
sense would handle the common stuff of life as surely and as freely as
it deals with tragedy. In this particular poem, of course, the touches
are of the nature of low comedy; the awkward sweethearting of a pair of
rustic lovers; the showman, alternating between bluster and enticement;
the rough banter of a group of farm lads about the cokernut-shy, and the
matron who presides there--
Swarthy and handsome and broad of face
'Twixt the banded brown of her glossy hair.
In her ears are shining silver rings,
Her head and massive throat are bare,
She needs good length in her apron strings
And has a jolly voice and loud
To cry her wares and draw the crowd.
--Fine Coker-nuts! My lads, we're giving
Clean away! Who wants to win 'em?
Fresh Coker-nuts! The milk's yet in 'em.
Come boys! Only a penny a shot,
Three nuts if you hit and the fun if not.
The effects are broad and strong, the tone cheery. But in another piece
where the dramatic element enters, "The May Morning and the Old Man,"
the note is deeper. There is, indeed, in the talk of the two old men on
the downland road, a much graver tone of the Comic Spirit. One of them
has come slowly up the hill and greets another who is working in a field
by the roadside with a question. He wants to know how far it is to
Chillingbourne; he is going back to his old home there and must reach it
before nightfall.
FIRST OLD MAN. It bean't for j'y I taäk the roäd.
But, Mester, I be getten awld.
Do seem as though in all the e'th
There bean't no plaäce,
No room on e'th for awld volk.
SECOND OLD MAN. The e'th do lie
Yonder, so wide as Heaven a'most,
And God as made un
Made room, I warr'nt, for all Christian souls.
It is, however, through the medium of tragedy that the genius of Mrs
Woods has found most powerful expression. Not her charming lyrics, not
even the contemplative beauty of her elegiac poems, can stand beside the
creative energy of the two plays to which we must come directly. But the
best of the lyrics are notable, nevertheless; and two or three have
already passed into the common store of great English poetry. Of such is
the splendid hymn, "To the Forgotten Dead," with its exulting pride of
race chastened by the thought of death.
To the forgotten dead,
Come, let us drink in silence ere we part.
To every fervent yet resolved heart
That brought its tameless passion and its tears,
Renunciation and laborious years,
To lay the deep foundations of our race,
To rear its mighty ramparts overhead
And light its pinnacles with golden grace.
To the unhonoured dead.
To the forgotten dead,
Whose dauntless hands were stretched to grasp the rein
Of Fate and hurl into the void again
Her thunder-hoofed horses, rushing blind
Earthward along the courses of the wind.
Among the stars along the wind in vain
Their souls were scattered and their blood was shed,
And nothing, nothing of them doth remain.
To the thrice-perished dead.
It will be seen that the lyric gift of the poet moves at the prompting
of an imaginative passion. It is nearly always so in this poetry. Very
seldom does the impulse appear to come from intimate personal emotion or
individual experience; and the volume may therefore help to refute the
dogma that the poetry of a woman is bound to be subjective, from the
laws of her own nature. Occasionally, of course, a direct cry will seem
to make itself heard--the most reticent human creature will pay so much
toll to its humanity. And it is true that in such a spontaneous
utterance the voice will be distinctively feminine--life as the woman
knows it will find its interpreter. Thus we see austerity breaking down
in the poem "On the Death of an Infant," mournfully sweet with a
mother's sorrow. Hence, too, in "Under the Lamp" comes the loathing for
"the vile hidden commerce of the city"; and equally there comes a touch
of that feminine bias (yielding in these late days perhaps to fuller
knowledge and consequent sympathy) which inclines to regard the evil
from the point of view of the degradation of the man rather than that of
the hideous wrong to the woman. Or again, there is "The Changeling,"
perhaps the tenderest of the few poems which may perhaps, in some sense,
be called subjective. Through the thin veil of allegory one catches a
glimpse of the enduring mystery of maternal love. The mother is brooding
over the change in her child: she has not been watchful enough, she
thinks; and while she was unheeding, some evil thing had entered into
her baby and driven out the fair soul with which he began.
Perhaps he called me and I was dumb.
Unconcerned I sat and heard
Little things,
Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings,
A frightened bird--
Or faint hands at the window-pane?
And now he will never come again,
The little soul. He is quite lost.
She tries to woo him back, with prayer and incantations; but he will not
come; and when at last she is worn out with waiting, she seeks an old
wizard and begs him to give her forgetfulness. But it is a hard thing
that she is asking: it needs a mighty spell to make a woman forget her
son; and the mother has to go without the boon. She has not wealth
enough in the world to pay the Wise Man's fee. But afterwards she is
glad that she was too poor to pay the price:
Because if I did not remember him,
My little child--Ah! what should we have,
He and I? Not even a grave
With a name of his own by the river's brim.
Because if among the poppies gay
On the hill-side, now my eyes are dim,
I could not fancy a child at play,
And if I should pass by the pool in the quarry
And never see him, a darling ghost,
Sailing a boat there, I should be sorry--
If in the firelit, lone December
I never heard him come scampering post
Haste down the stair--if the soul that is lost
Came back, and I did not remember.
Such poetry reveals the woman in the poet, and is precious for that
reason: it brings its own new light to the book of humanity. But it is
not especially characteristic of Mrs Woods' work, for much more often it
is the poet in the woman who is revealed there. Powers which are
independent of sex--of imagination, of sensibility, and of thought, have
gone to the making of that which is finest in her verse; and surely
these are gifts which, in varying degree, distinguish the poetic soul
under any guise. They are not equally present here, of course.
Imagination overtops them, darting with the lightness of a bird, or
soaring majestically, or sweeping, strong and rapid, through a
storm-cloud, or putting a swift girdle round the earth. Thought is a
degree less powerful, perhaps. It is brooding, museful, tinged with a
melancholy that may be wistful or passionate; and though it commonly
revolves the larger issues of life within the canons of authority, it is
keen and clear enough to see beyond them, and even, upon occasion, to
pierce a way through. But it is not always sufficiently strong to
control completely so fertile an imagination; and there is no acute
sense of fact to reinforce it with truth of detail. Instead of watching,
recording, analyzing, after the method of so many contemporary poets,
this is a mentality which contemplates and reflects. It leans lovingly
toward the past, and has a sense, partly instinctive and partly
scholarly, of historic values: while, for its artistic method, it passes
all the treasure that fancy has gathered, and even passion itself,
through the alembic of memory. So is created a softer grace, a serener
atmosphere, and a richer dignity than the realist can achieve--and we
will not be churlish enough to complain if, at the same time, the salt
of reality is missing.
I should think that "The Builders, A Nocturne in Westminster Abbey,"
most fully represents this poet's lyrical gift. Individual qualities of
it may perhaps be observed more clearly elsewhere; but here they combine
to produce an effect of meditative sweetness and stately, elegiac grace
which are very characteristic. The poem is in ten movements, of very
unequal length and irregular form. It is unrhymed, and stanzas may vary
almost indefinitely in length, as the verse may pass from a dimeter,
light or resonant, up through the intervening measures to the roll of
the hexameter. But this originality of technique, leaving room for so
many shades of thought and feeling, was certainly inspired; and below
the changeful form runs perfect unity of tone. The creative impulse is
subdued to the contemplative mood induced in the mind of the poet as she
stands in the Abbey at night and broods upon its history. Her thought
goes far back, to the early builders of the fabric whose pale phantoms
seem to float in the shades of the 'grey ascending arches.'
When the stars are muffled and under them all the earth
Is a fiery fog and the sinister roar of London,
They lament for the toil of their hands, their souls' travail--
"Ah, the beautiful work!"
It was set to shine in the sun, to companion the stars
To endure as the hills, the ancient hills, endure,
Lo, like a brand
It lies, a brand consumed and blackened of fire,
In the fierce heart of London.
Or, like Dante, this poet will follow the old ghosts to a more dreadful
region, and bring them news of home--
Fain would my spirit,
My living soul beat up the wind of death
To the inaccessible shore and with warm voice
Deep-resonant of the earth, salute the dead:
.....
I also would bring
To the old unheeded spirits news of Earth;
Of England, their own country, choose to tell them,
And how above St. Edward's bones the Minister
Gloriously stands, how it no more beholds
The silver Thames broadening among green meadows
And gardens green, nor sudden shimmer of streams
And the clear mild blue hills.
Rather so high it stands the whole earth under
Spreads boundless and the illimitable sea.
The steps of the sentry, pacing over the stones which cover the great
dead below, remind her of those other builders who lie there, makers of
Empire.
Over what dust the atom footfall passes!
Out of what distant lands, by what adventures
Superbly gathered
To lie so still in the unquiet heart of London!
Is not the balm of Africa yet clinging
About the bones of Livingstone? Consider
The long life-wandering, the strange last journey
Of this, the heroic lion-branded corpse,
Still urging to the sea!
And here the eventual far-off deep repose.
This poem is characteristic, both in the way it blends imagination and
profound feeling with pensive thought, and in its literary flavour. One
may note the opulent language, enriched from older sources, the
historical lore and the allusive touch so fascinating to those who love
literature for its own sake. But the poet can work at times in a very
different manner. There is, for instance, another piece of unrhymed
verse, "March Thoughts From England," which is a riot of light and
colour, rich scent and lovely shape and bewitching sound--the sensuous
rapture evoked by a Provençal scene 'recollected in tranquillity.' Or
there is "April," with the keen joy of an English spring, also a glad
response to the direct impressions of sense. Imagination is subordinated
here; but if we turn in another direction we are likely to find it
paramount. It may be manifested in such various degrees and through such
different media that sharp contrasts will present themselves. Thus we
might turn at once from the playful fancy of "The Child Alone" (where a
little maid has escaped from mother and nurse into the wonderful,
enchanted, adventurous world just outside the garden) to the
thrice-heated fire of "Again I Saw Another Angel." Here imagination has
fanned thought to its own fierce heat; and in the sudden flame serenity
is shrivelled up and gives place to passionate despair. In a vision the
poet sees the awful messenger of the Lord leap into the heavens with a
great cry--
Then suddenly the earth was white
With faces turned towards his light.
The nations' pale expectancy
Sobbed far beneath him like the sea,
But men exulted in their dread,
And drunken with an awful glee
Beat at the portals of the dead.
I saw this monstrous grave the earth
Shake with a spasm as though of birth,
And shudder with a sullen sound,
As though the dead stirred in the ground.
And that great angel girt with flame
Cried till the heavens were rent around,
"Come forth ye dead!"--Yet no man came.
But from the intensity of that we may pass to the dainty grace of the
Songs, where the poet is weaving in a gossamer texture. Or we may
consider a love-lyric like "Passing," a fragile thing, lightly evoked
out of a touch of fantasy and a breath of sweet pain.
With thoughts too lovely to be true,
With thousand, thousand dreams I strew
The path that you must come. And you
Will find but dew.
I break my heart here, love, to dower
With all its inmost sweet your bower.
What scent will greet you in an hour?
The gorse in flower.
In the plays there are lyrics, too, delicately stressing their character
of poetic drama, and giving full compass to the author's powers in each
work. Indeed, the combination of lyric and dramatic elements is very
skilfully and effectively managed. There is a ballad which serves in
each case to state the _motif_ at the opening of the play: not in so
many words, of course, but suggested in the tragical events of some old
story. And snatches of the ballad recur throughout, crooned by one of
the persons of the drama, or played by a lutist at a gay court festival.
But always the dramatic scheme is subserved by the lyrical fragments.
Sometimes it will fill a short interval with a note of foreboding, or
make a running accompaniment to the action, or induce an ironic tone,
or, by interpreting emotion, it will relieve tension which had grown
almost too acute. But, fittingly, when the crisis approaches and action
must move freely to the end, the lyric element disappears.
"The Ballad of the Mother," which precedes "Wild Justice," creates the
atmosphere in which the play moves from beginning to end. It prefigures
the plot, too, in its story of the dead mother who hears her children
weeping from her grave in the churchyard; and, after vainly imploring
both angel and sexton to let her go and comfort them, makes a compact
with the devil to release her.
"Then help me out, devil, O help me, good devil!"
"A price must be paid to a spirit of evil.
Will you pay me the price?" said the spirit from Hell.
"The price shall be paid, the bargain is made."
.....
Boom! boom! boom!
From the tower in the silence there sounds the great bell.
"I am fixing the price," said the devil from Hell.
The mother in the play is Mrs Gwyllim, wife of a vicious tyrant. For
twenty-one years she had borne cruelty and humiliation at his hands. She
had even been patient under the wrongs which he had inflicted on her
children: the violence which had maimed her eldest son, Owain, in his
infancy; which had hounded another boy away to sea and had driven a
daughter into a madhouse. But at the opening of the play a sterner
spirit is growing in her: meekness and submission are beginning to break
down under the consciousness of a larger duty to her children. We find
that she has been making appeals for help, first to their only
accessible relation; and that failing, to the Vicar of their parish. But
neither of these men had dared to move against the tyrant. They live on
a lonely little island off the coast of Wales, where Gwyllim practically
has the small population in his power. He had built a lighthouse on the
coast; and at the time of the action, which is early in the nineteenth
century, he is empowered to own it and to take toll from passing
vessels. Thus he controls the means of existence of the working people;
and the rest are deterred, by reasons of policy or family interest, from
putting any check upon him.
In the first scene the mother announces to her daughter Nelto and her
favourite son Shonnin the result of her appeal to the Vicar. His only
reply had been to affront her with a counsel of patience, though
Gwyllim's misconduct is as notorious as his wife's long-suffering. We
are thus made to realize the isolation and helplessness of the family
before we proceed to the second scene, with its culmination of Gwyllim's
villainy and the first hint of rebellion. He comes into the house,
furious at the discovery of what he calls his wife's treachery. Owain,
the crippled son, is present during part of the scene; and Nelto passes
and repasses before the open door of an inner room, hushing the baby
with stanzas of the ballad which opens the play. In the presence of
their children, Gwyllim raves at his wife, taunts her with her
helplessness, boasts of his own infidelity, and flings a base charge at
her, of which he says he has already informed the parson; while Nelto
croons--
The angels are fled, and the sexton is sleeping,
And I am a devil, a devil from Hell.
The mother does not answer; but Owain is goaded to protest. This only
excites Gwyllim further, and he strikes Owain as he sits in his invalid
chair; while Shonnin, coming in from the adjoining room, brings the
scene to a climax by asking of his father the money that he needs to go
away to school. Gwyllim replies, taking off his coat meanwhile, that
there is a certain rule in his family. When a son of his is man enough
to knock him down he shall have money to go out into the world; but not
before. He invites Shonnin to try his strength:
GWYLLIM. ... Come on. Why don't you come on? I'm making no
defence.
SHONNIN. Mother?
GWYLLIM. Leave her alone. Strike me, boy. I bid you do it.
SHONNIN. Then I will; with all my might, and may God
increase it!
OWAIN. There is no God.
Shonnin strikes three times; and is then felled by a blow from his
father, who goes out, shouting orders to wife as he retreats. The scene
closes in a final horror. Nelto, a pretty, high-spirited girl, has
hitherto taken little part in the action. Her character, however, has
been clearly indicated in one or two strong touches. We realize that she
is young, impulsive, warm-hearted; keenly sensitive to beauty, wilful
and bright; thrilling to her fingertips with life that craves its
birthright of liberty and joy. But we see, too, that with all her ardour
she is as proud and cold in her attitude to love as a very Artemis. And
when she declares that she also has reached the point of desperation,
and that sooner than remain longer in the gloom and terror of her home
she will fling herself into a shameful career, we feel that the climax
has indeed been reached.