"Oh, never a doubt but somewhere I shall wake;"
again, --
"the light,
Returning, shall give back the golden hours,
Ocean a windless level. . . ."
again, best of all, in the last word, --
"Still may Time hold some golden space
Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them."
He cannot forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets".
He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering
through the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalis
in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best",
beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant
with the spirit still unsubdued. --
"Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet
Death as a friend."
So go, "with unreluctant tread". But in the disillusionment of beauty
and of love there is an older tone. With what bitter savor, with what
grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements
in his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms.
A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merely
that beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their going
they are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference.
And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!
Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasy
than by its collapse. It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound;
but it is the fruit of intensity, and bears the traits.
The search for solitude, the relief from crowds, the open door into nature;
the sense of flight and escape; the repeated thought of safety,
the insistent fatigue, the cry for sleep; -- all these bear confession
in their faces. "Flight", "Town and Country", "The Voice", are eloquent
of what they leave untold; and the climax of "Retrospect", --
"And I should sleep, and I should sleep," --
or the sestet of "Waikiki", or the whole fainting sonnet
entitled "A Memory", belong to the nadir of vitality. At moments
weariness set in like a spiritual tide. I associate, too, with such moods,
psychologically at least, his visions of the "arrested moment", as in
"Dining-Room Tea", -- a sort of trance state -- or in the pendant sonnet.
Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brooke
seems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully
such moments. But even when the image of life, imaginative or real,
falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite
body of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish"!
For I cannot express too strongly my admiration of the literary sense
of this young poet, and my delight in it. "All these have been my loves,"
he says, if I may repeat the phrase; but he seems to have loved the words,
as much as the things, -- "dear names", he adds. The born man of letters
speaks there. So, when his pulse is at its lowest,
he cannot forget the beautiful surface of his South Sea idyls
or of versified English gardens and lanes. He cared as much
for the expression as for the thing, which is what makes a man of letters.
So fixed is this habit that his art, truly, is independent
of his bodily state. In his poems of "collapse" as in those of "ecstasy"
he seems to me equally master of his mood, -- like those poets who are
"for all time". His literary skill in verse was ripe, how long so ever
he might have to live.