IV
And Mr. Bridges, even when at his best, is not only a landscape poet, but a poet cunning in the experiences of the heart. Very many of his poems are love poems and many of them are beautiful: if the fact has not been widely observed it must be because they are happy love poems, or at least because they are not excessive in expression. The proclivity that makes him, in another sphere, write not about storms but about calms after storms, is seen always: he has no violence, no vehement abandonment. But there is little of that in Wordsworth and other poets the depth of whose affections, the reality of whose suffering, cannot be doubted. Mr. Bridges's love-poetry makes no brutal assault on us. His constant reference to Virgil, Mozart and the old composers is significant. He never declaims, never raves, despairs, or burns in print: but he knows the ways of lovers' hearts, and his quiet stanzas, whether their subject be the pain of doubt, or separation, or the joy of union, or calm affection by the warm domestic hearth, have a truth and strength which outwear the ardours of many poets. In When My Love was Away, My Spirit sang all day, I will not let thee go, and twenty more he lover's calendar is written as that of the seasons elsewhere, and if his praise is soft and measured like the old music in which he so constantly delights, love's fine extravagance is, for all the tempered sound, nevertheless there:
Her beauty would surprise
Gazers on Autumn eves,
Who watched the broad moon rise
Upon the scattered sheaves.
He is self-controlled and never shouts; he does not hunt the universe for new and strange sorrows nor harrow himself overmuch with the problems of existence; but those griefs that fall to the common lot of mankind have come to him and drawn beautiful poetry from him. Many poets have written habitually of Death; few have said as little about Death as Mr. Bridges; but he has said all he has to say and need say about death, loss, and sorrow in two poems, the poem which begins:
I never shall love the snow again
Since Maurice died,
and the other On a Dead Child: "Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee...."
So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing—
Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed—
Propping thy wise, sad head,
Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.
So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither hath he taken thee?
To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?
The vision of which I miss,
Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?
Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.
In Winter Nightfall there is all the complaint of ailing old age, in Pater Filio the passionate anxiety of parent for child; the normal, inevitable griefs and dejections are all here, expressed with gravity, yet always with poignancy. But normal and inevitable they are. One gets the impression that, beyond the "common lot," the poet has had few distresses. Intense joy—nobody has given it better definition than he—is as rare as intense sadness, but ordinarily he is happy, or at worst not uncomfortably melancholy, and the happiness has become more pervasive as he has grown older. He is the poet of a leisured country life, led by a sensitive physically healthy man, with whom the major things of life have gone well and who, in those circumstances, is temperamentally inclined to a grateful contentment.