A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

THE POETS

In the section that follows we have made a careful selection from the poets of the period. Many more names might have been included, of a value and interest little inferior to those given a place. In any case, a selection such as this must be in the nature of an experiment, for time alone will sift out the poems of permanent value.

1. Sir William Watson was born in 1858, the son of a Yorkshire farmer, and was educated privately. His life has been devoted to letters: a devotion that was recognized by Mr. Gladstone, who transferred to him (1893) the Civil List pension that had been granted to Tennyson. He was knighted in 1917.

His fairly abundant poetry includes The Prince’s Quest (1880), after the manner of Tennyson; Wordsworth’s Grave (1890), the style of which suggests the meditative poetry of Matthew Arnold; Lacrymæ Musarum (1893), which contains a fine elegy on the death of Tennyson; The Muse in Exile (1913); and The Superhuman Antagonists (1919). Sir William Watson is at his best as an elegiac poet, when, though he is apt to become diffusely meditative, he writes with sincerity and a scholarly enthusiasm. In the heroic vein, such as he attempted in the last poem mentioned above, he is merely violent, without being impressive. His political poetry, such as The Year of Shame (1897), is strong rhetorical verse, palpably sincere, but of no high poetical merit.

2. Francis Thompson (1859–1907) had a career suggestive of that of the poets of the eighteenth century. He was born in Lancashire, and was dedicated to the profession of medicine. He abandoned medicine, and went to London as a friendless literary adventurer. Then followed the tragically familiar tale of loneliness, poverty, opium, and disease. After a time (1893) his poems drew a little attention to himself, and he was rescued just in time from the fate of Chatterton. His health, however, was never fully restored, and finally he died of consumption.

In style and temper Thompson is a strange blend of the poets of past epochs. He has the rapt religious enthusiasm and the soaring imagination of the Metaphysical poets, as can be clearly seen in his truly magnificent Hound of Heaven; or again, as in The Daisy, he is the inspired babbler of the type of William Blake. In one sense he wrote too much, when he marred his splendid lyrical energy with too abundant detail; in another sense he wrote too little, for the fire that was within him was extinguished before it could burn clear. He is not quite another Coleridge, hag-ridden with opium, but at least he is a lyrical poet far above mediocrity.

3. John Masefield (born 1874) has contributed much poetry to modern literature. Quite a budget of long descriptive-narrative poems has come from him, including The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), a grimly realistic tale; Dauber (1913), full of the splendor and terror of the sea; and Reynard the Fox (1920), a bustling tale of the foxhunt. These long poems are well informed and masterfully narrated, with many purple passages of description, and in the grimmer incidents a strong fidelity to fact that does not stop short of strong language. Mr. Masefield’s shorter poems, though they do not include any great lyrics, are dignified, reticent, and tuneful. He is undoubtedly at his best when he writes of the sea, a subject that was never far from the hearts of his great poetical predecessors.

4. William H. Davies was born at Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1870. In his youth he emigrated to America, where he became a tramp, and then served as a cattleman on a steamer. An accident in which he lost a foot made him incapable of hard physical work, so for a living he sang in the streets and lived in common lodging-houses. His first volume of verse, The Soul’s Destroyer (1906), rescued him from penury. His Collected Poems (1916) and Forty New Pieces (1918) contain his best work.

Like Burns, Mr. Davies is the natural, untaught lyrical genius. His capacity is neither so deep nor so intense as that of Burns, but within his limits he can write poems of great beauty. When he writes of nature he almost recreates the spirit of Wordsworth, he shows such insight, freshness, and ease. His artless simplicity is at times almost grotesque, yet the reader cannot help admitting that it is in keeping with his subject. This marked naïveté, however, is often given a queer metaphysical twist; or it sometimes rises, with a mighty rhythm, into passages of noble harmony. At least half a dozen of his shorter pieces—the expressive Thunderstorms; the exquisite Moon, so old in theme and so original in expression; the dainty Sweet Stay-at-Home, with its haunting Caroline meter and phrasing; the absolutely perfect The White Cascade, eight lines long; the provokingly beautiful Dreams of the Sea, that one cries out upon as being too wonderful to be merely imitative of the grand Marlowe manner; and the amazing verses, Elizabethan to the core, beginning When I Am Old—are stamped with immortality. The temptation to quote is irresistible:

(1) When I am old, and it is spring,

And joy leaps dancing, wild and free,

Clear out of every living thing,

While I command no ecstasy;

And to translate the songs of birds

Will be beyond my power in words:

*****

For when these little songs shall fail,

These happy notes that to the world

Are puny mole-hills, nothing more,

That unto me are Alps of gold—

That toad’s dark life must be my own,

Buried alive inside a stone.

(2) Thou knowest the way to tame the wildest life,

Thou knowest the way to bend the great and proud:

I think of that Armada whose puffed sails,

Greedy and large, came swallowing every cloud.

But I have seen the sea-boy young and drowned,

Lying on shore, and, by thy cruel hand,

A seaweed beard was on his tender chin,

His heaven-blue eyes were filled with common sand.

And yet, for all, I yearn for thee again,

To sail once more upon thy fickle flood:

I’ll hear thy waves wash under my death-bed,

Thy salt is lodged for ever in my blood.

Dreams of the Sea

5. John Drinkwater (born 1882) was educated at Oxford High School, and for a time worked in insurance offices. He has done much to revive the modern drama, helping to found the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. As a poet he is representative of the work of his day: meditative rather than passionate, descriptive rather than narrative, and always clear, competent, and precise. He is one of the best of modern blank-verse writers. His shorter poems will be found in his Poems of 1908–1914 (1914) and Swords and Ploughshares (1915).

6. Rupert C. Brooke (1887–1915) was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, and for a time traveled in America. In 1914 he enlisted in the Royal Naval Division, took part in the fighting at Antwerp, and died of fever while on active service in the Dardanelles.

Brooke’s lamentably early death gave rise to a quite natural tendency to overpraise his poetry. The exaggerated estimates made at his death must be revised, and real justice done to his name. As a poet he is not consistently great, but he is always readable, often delightfully mannered and humorous (as in the poem called Heaven), and on at least one occasion, in the splendid sonnet called The Soldier, touches greatness. His sonnets are perhaps his best achievement. In this very difficult species of composition he has the requisite technical skill and delicate ear for rhythm, and he can catch the unmistakable surge and swell that mark the successful sonnet.

We quote from his piece called Heaven. In felicity of phrasing and aptness of humor it is of the best Metaphysical tradition.

But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,

Is wetter water, slimier slime!

And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

Who swam ere rivers were begun,

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Oh! never fly conceals a hook,

Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,

But more than mundane weeds are there,

And mud, celestially fair;

Fat caterpillars drift around,

And Paradisal grubs are found;

Unfading moths, immortal flies,

And the worm that never dies.

And in that Heaven of all their wish,

There shall be no more land, say fish.

7. William B. Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865, and was educated both in London and in his native city. He studied art, but his real bent was literary. He was one of the chief supporters of the Celtic Revival, helped to found the Irish Literary Theatre (1899), wrote plays for it, and discovered other literary talent, including that of Mr. Synge.

Mr. Yeats’s poetry was published in several volumes, and was issued in a collected edition in 1908. The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) was his first volume, and among the rest we may mention The Countess Cathleen (1892), a romantic drama, The Wind among the Reeds (1899), containing some of his best lyrics, and The Wild Swans of Coole (1917). Of his poetical plays The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) is perhaps the best, and of the prose dramas Cathleen ni Hoolihan (1902) is a fine example.

Mr. Yeats is a fastidious poet, writing little and revising often. As a consequence the average merit of his poetry is very high; and sometimes, as in the often-quoted Lake Isle of Innisfree, he breathes the pathos and longing that are generally regarded as typical of the Celtic spirit. His style has the usual Celtic peculiarities: a meditative and melancholy beauty, a misty idealism, and a sweet and dignified diction. Mr. Yeats is the most important of the modern Irish poets.