James Elroy Flecker died in January 1915, having added at least one poem
to the perfect anthology of English verse. Probably his work contains a
good deal that is permanent besides this. But one is confident at least
of the permanence of _The Old Ships_. Readers coming a thousand years
hence upon the beauty, the romance and the colour of this poem will turn
eagerly, one imagines, in search of other work from the same pen. This
was the flower of the poet's genius. It was the exultant and original
speech of one who was in a great measure the seer of other men's
visions. Flecker was much given to the translation of other poets, and
he did not stop at translating their words. He translated their
imagination also into careful verse. He was one of those poets whose
genius is founded in the love of literature more than in the love of
life. He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who sought
after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the
Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the _Arabian
Nights_.
"He began," Mr. J.C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in his
art than in himself." And all but a score or so of his poems suggest
that this was his way to the last. He was one of those for whom the
visible world exists. But it existed for him less in nature than in art.
He does not give one the impression of a poet who observed minutely and
delightedly as Mr. W.H. Davies observes. His was a painted world
inhabited by a number of chosen and exquisite images. He found the real
world by comparison disappointing. "He confessed," we are told, "that he
had not greatly liked the East--always excepting, of course, Greece."
This was almost a necessity of his genius; and it is interesting to see
how in some of his later work his imagination is feeling its way back
from the world of illusion to the world of real things--from Bagdad and
Babylon to England. His poetry does not as a rule touch the heart; but
in _Oak and Olive_ and _Brumana_ his spectatorial sensuousness at last
breaks down and the cry of the exile moves us as in an intimate letter
from a friend since dead. Those are not mere rhetorical reproaches to
the "traitor pines" which
sang what life has found
The falsest of fair tales;
which had murmured of--
older seas
That beat on vaster sands,
and of--
lands
Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.
It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the
war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a
poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. _The Burial in
England_ is perhaps too much of an _ad hoc_ call to be great poetry. But
it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different
world from his mediocre version of _God Save the King_.
At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion
is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is
to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as
_The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus_,
and _Bryan of Brittany_. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it
were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world
of the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftener
of amorousness than of love, as in _The Ballad of the Student of the
South._ His passion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East,
stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a
brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice
extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon
which Mr. Squire comments:
There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially
fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver
and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses
of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet
of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images
of Fire, of a ship, and of an old white-bearded man recur
frequently in his poems.
Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker is
anything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a ship was almost an
obsession with him. It was his favourite toy. Often it is a silver ship.
In the blind man's vision in the time of Christ even the Empires of the
future are seen sailing like ships. The keeper of the West Gate of
Damascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:
when no wind breathes or ripple stirs,
And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.
Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest' how much
in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination
was haunted. His world was a world of nursery ships and nursery
caravans.
"Haunted" is, perhaps, an exaggeration. His attitude is too impassive
for that. He works with the deliberateness of a prose-writer. He is
occasionally even prosaic in the bad sense, as when he uses: the word
"meticulously," or makes his lost mariners say:
How striking like that boat were we
In the days, sweet days, when we put to sea.
That he was a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination also
tended to keep his poetry near the ground. His love of the ballad-design
and "the good coloured things of Earth" was tempered by a kind of
infidel humour in his use of them. His ballads are the ballads of a
brilliant dilettante, not of a man who is expressing his whole heart and
soul and faith, as the old ballad-writers were. In the result he walked
a golden pavement rather than mounted into the golden air. He was an
artist in ornament, in decoration. Like the Queen in the _Queen's Song_,
he would immortalize the ornament at the cost of slaying the soul.
Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. The
classical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of
the noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preserved
the ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as a
sign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot be
denied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. His book,
indeed, is a treasury of beauty rare in these days. Of that beauty, _The
Old Ships_ is, as I have said, the splendid example. And, as it is
foolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of his
work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those
gorgeously-coloured verses which begin:
I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,
With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;
And all those ships were certainly so old--
Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell-raked them till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.
But now through friendly seas they softly run,
Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,
Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.
That is the summary and the summit of Flecker's genius. But the rest of
his verse, too, is the work of a true and delightful poet, a faithful
priest of literature, an honest craftsman with words.