"And evening hush broken by homing wings,"
Such lines as these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner
of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled
contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling
of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways
he was conspicuously successful in his art.
The first of these -- they are all in the larger forms of art --
is the dramatic sonnet, by which I do not mean merely
a sonnet in dialogue or advancing by simple contrast;
but one in which there may be these things, but also there is
a tragic reversal or its equivalent. Not to consider it too curiously,
take "The Hill". This sonnet is beautiful in action and diction;
its eloquence speeds it on with a lift; the situation is
the very crest of life; then, --
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread,
Rose-crowned into the darkness! . . . Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
-- And then you suddenly cried and turned away."
The dramatic sonnet in English has not gone beyond that, for beauty,
for brevity, for tragic effect, -- nor, I add, for unspoken loyalty
to reality. Reality was, perhaps, what he most dearly wished for;
here he achieved it. In many another sonnet he won the laurel;
but if I were to venture to choose, it is in the dramatic handling
of the sonnet that he is most individual and characteristic.
The second great success of his genius, formally considered,
lay in the narrative idyl, either in the Miltonic way of flashing bits
of English country landscape before the eye, as in "Grantchester",
or by applying essentially the same method to the water world of fishes
or the South Sea world, both on a philosophic background.
These are all master poems of a kaleidoscopic beauty and charm,
where the brief pictures play in and out of a woven veil of thought,
irony, mood, with a delightful intellectual pleasuring.
He thoroughly enjoys doing the poetical magic. Such bits of
English retreats or Pacific paradises, so full of idyllic charm,
exquisite in image and movement, are among the rarest of poetic treasures.
The thought of Milton and of Marvell only adds an old world charm
to the most modern of the works of the Muses. What lightness of touch,
what ease of movement, what brilliancy of hue! What vivacity throughout!
Even in "Retrospect", what actuality!
And the third success is what I should call the "melange". That is,
the method of indiscrimination by which he gathers up experience,
and pours it out again in language, with full disregard
of its relative values. His good taste saves him from what in another
would be shipwreck, but this indifference to values, this apparent lack
of selection in material, while at times it gives a huddled flow,
more than anything else "modernizes" the verse. It yields, too,
an effect of abundant vitality, and it makes facile the change
from grave to gay and the like. The "melange", as I call it,
is rather an innovation in English verse, and to be found only rarely.
It exists, however; and especially it was dear to Keats in his youth.
It is by excellent taste, and by style, that the poet here overcomes
its early difficulties.
In these three formal ways, besides in minor matters, it appears to me
that Rupert Brooke, judged by the most orthodox standards,
had succeeded in poetry.