POETRY
POEMS, 1916–1918. By Francis Brett Young. Collins. 5s. net.
Mr. Brett Young's Marching on Tanga was the best written of all the books produced during the war by men on active service. Its imaginative quality and the charm of its style were no surprise to those who knew his early novels, of which The Dark Tower was the most notable. It has been succeeded by two other prose works, The Crescent Moon, an African story, the melodrama of which is veiled by the beautiful descriptive writing, and The Young Physician, a more naturalistic essay which was noticed in our first number. Unobtrusively, amid these other activities, he published two or three years ago a little book of verses, Five Degrees South; and in this new volume are gathered the contents of that book and the poems that their author has written more recently.
The volume is characteristically Georgian. There are hints, here and there, of musings which may develop into a general conception of the universe and of man; there are points of contact with the problems which vex the reflective spirit. But, generally speaking, Mr. Brett Young is content to sing, briefly and with deep feeling, of a few things securely loved: and those points of contact are points of departure. He writes of England—friends, landscapes, and a woman—before he leaves England. When he is in Africa the blood and struggle, the fell tropical scenery, seem but to make acuter the response to the England that is lost; and when he comes home again he sings again of home recovered and loved with a new intensity. The Gift gives the keynote of the book:
Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain,
Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,
England came to me—me who had always ta'en
But never given before—England, the giver,
In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver
On still evenings of summer, after rain,
By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver
When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.
Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,
And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake
Shivering all night through till cold daybreak.
In that I count these sufferings my gain,
And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain
Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.
That is from Africa, where he rides through marshes swarming with cruel life and admires the sickly beauty of the fever tree, but always as an alien. Then he returns:
I saw a thrush light on a hawthorn spray,
One moment only, spilling creamy blossom,
While the bough bent beneath her speckled bosom,
Bent, and recovered, and she fluttered away.
The branch was still; but in my heart, a pain
Than the thorn'd spray more cruel stabbed me, only
Remembering days in a far land and lonely,
When I had never hoped for summer again.
All his deepest feelings—patriotism, love, friendship—are interwoven with natural beauty. In Testament he leaves to his friend the common memory of a summer in the Cotswolds: sunlight on the gables of Evesham, a boat on the cool water of Avon, sunsets over Bredon, evening stocks and the scent of hay; and in the most eloquent close, putting the most beautiful scenes of earth behind him to sing of spiritual beauty, he lingers on them to describe them. But his descriptions are always prompted and suffused by emotion: like Brooke in The Happy Lover and Mr. Masefield in Biography, he catalogues the scenes, the fields, trees, flowers, and faces that live sweetly in his memory, and his affection is communicated. He is poles away from the "careful nature poet" who makes a neat drawing of anything that at all interests him. Emotion selects his subjects; he does not manufacture. He writes clearly too and unaffectedly. Except in Thamar—the most ambitious poem in the book, but promising a greater success than it achieves—he is never obscure for a moment. And his simplicity of expression conceals a good deal of technical effort. The longer pieces—such as The Leaning Elm—are elaborately musical, and an examination of the first poem quoted above will reveal studied, though not obtrusive, assonances and internal rhymes which show that Mr. Brett Young (it might be deduced elsewhere from his metres) has not read his Bridges in vain. There is scarcely a bad poem in the book, or one without an interest peculiar to itself. Several beyond those we have mentioned—the best are the exquisite Prothalamion and Invocation—are to be found in the recent Georgian book. The poem on prehistoric remains on the battlefield might well have been added, and Bête Humaine:
Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,
I saw the world awake; and as the ray
Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,
Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,
With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay
Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes.
Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
And horror, at my own careless cruelty,
That where all things are cruel I had slain
A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
Like beasts that prey with bloody claw: Nay, they
Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?
This is a book which excites great curiosity about its author's future; but at present his verse, beautiful as it is, lacks energy.
COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY. Macmillan. 8s. 6d. net.
RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE: INCLUSIVE EDITION, 1885–1918. Three vols. Hodder & Stoughton. 63s. net.
It is always a satisfaction to have in one volume—or in two or three uniform volumes—the verses of a poet which we have previously had to search for in self-contained books. The publication of a collected edition of Mr. Hardy's poems is welcome for another reason. In the last few years his reputation as a poet—quite apart from the fact that he has continued, right up to his eightieth year, to produce novel and beautiful work—has greatly increased. Critics may now be found who even hold that Mr. Hardy's chief claim to greatness will rest, in the eyes of posterity, upon his poems (including The Dynasts) rather than upon those novels which in themselves made him one of the two or three most conspicuous writers of his generation. But even now we do not think that his stature as a poet is widely realised, the volume and quality of his poetical work generally known: and there will probably be many who, in perusing this "collected" volume, will be struck for the first time with the fact that here alone, leaving all the prose out of the question, is work sufficient, and sufficiently good, to place its author among the greatest English writers of the last century. There are hundreds of pages of short poems, some of them exquisitely beautiful, and all of them so direct and fresh that even the most faulty are worth having. Faults—though we might rather call them idiosyncrasies—Mr. Hardy certainly has. His language is sometimes bald and sometimes cumbrous; his consistent pessimism sometimes leads him, in the dramatic poems, to extremes of deliberate gloom. But can we regret a sad philosophy which has enabled a sweet and sensitive spirit to shine with such uninterrupted brightness amid that gloom? And can we regret a habit of phraseology which has enabled Mr. Hardy to win some of his greatest technical triumphs (for he makes music out of scientific or journalistic words which would ruin an ordinary lyrist) and which will probably have direct results in the way of enlarging the poetic vocabulary, which is in constant need of oxygenation? It is inevitable that a collected edition in one volume should be printed in smaller type than is entirely comfortable, and the text of this edition is not so attractive as that of the separate volumes. But it is all here, and when the reader compares the volume to some of its companion Macmillan collections (Clough, for instance, falls into nothingness) he comprehends that in the history of English literature Mr. Hardy will rank above many of the supposedly established classics. He is a great poet.
The Kipling collection is luxuriously got up, but unfortunately the covers are not all they might be, and the reader is irritated throughout by the presence on the top of every right-hand page of "Inclusive Edition" in large black capitals. Mr. Kipling would show up far better in a selection than in a complete edition, so much of his verse is at best vigorous journalism. Were a good selection made we believe that some of those who depreciate him would admit for the first time that he has a fine poet in him; a collected edition merely shows that he does not know the poet in him from the rhymer. The greater one's admiration for his best work the greater the irritation one sustains when reading through the great body of his jingling journalism and pompous sermonising. Had he written nothing but the Ballad of East and West, the songs from Puck and a few more he would be as well remembered as he will be now with all this mass of versification to his name.
WHEELS 1919: A FOURTH CYCLE. Blackwell. 6s. net.
The end-papers of this volume bear a charming design of athletes throwing darts at targets, and it is to be observed that no one of them as yet has hit the bull's-eye. We do not know if the symbolism was deliberate, but it is apt, for the volume is full of potshots so wayward that we are usually uncertain as to which target these erratic slingers wish to hit. Music at least is not desired: most of the verses consist of strings of statements—if they are not disconnected the connections between them are not apparent to us—interesting neither severally nor jointly, and entirely without beauty of sound. Miss Edith Sitwell's verses, though incomprehensible, contain a good deal of vivid detail, pleasant because it reminds us of bright pictures. There is one poem by the late Wilfred Owen (Strange Meeting) which has a powerful, sombre beginning:
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached here from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said. "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other. "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also."
There are several other poems by him which have all the earnestness, and much of the force, of Mr. Sassoon's illustrations of the beastly cruelty of war. But the one poet included who is always arousing interest and curiosity is Mr. Aldous Huxley. Mr. Huxley, when these poems were written (though, in Leda, he seems already to be partly recovering), seems to have been in the same sort of revulsion against sentimentality as Rupert Brooke was in when his first book was being composed. He is anxious that we should not overlook the facts that there are noisome smells in the world, that many people are disgusting to see, and that even the most touching episode may be interrupted by an eructation: though, unlike Brooke, he does not usually even try to sing. There is something very familiar about the restaurant poem:
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What reeking steam of kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime ... but when the wearied band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand,
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
There is always strength about Mr. Huxley's epithets: he observes accurately and his language is hard, clear, and original. He conveys his unpleasing ruminations with such force that in several places we were incommoded by a rising in our gorge. But it is not in order to obtain sensations of that kind that we read poetry, and we shall not in idle hours beguile our leisure by repeating over and over the much-loved syllables of The Betrothal of Priapus. Mr. Huxley can see things with his own eyes, and has a powerful intelligence, and when he has discovered something to write about he may become a very good poet.
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN, AND OTHER POEMS. By Nicholas Vachel Lindsay. With an Introduction by Robert Nichols. Chatto & Windus. 5s. net.
Mr. Vachel Lindsay is best known as the author of poems, notably poems inspired by negro camp-meetings, which are meant for recitation; they have intoxicating rhythms and the language full of gusto. The Congo, The Daniel Jazz, and others should certainly be introduced to the British public, and perhaps Messrs. Chatto propose to follow up this volume with another containing Mr. Lindsay's later work. It is a pity, however, that the present collection should have come first, for it contains little that is characteristic of Mr. Lindsay at his best, and little, therefore, that will show readers here how good he can be. The title-poem, though not as good as some of its successors, is the only one now published which shows what Mr. Lindsay can do. It describes the entrance of the late General Booth into Paradise at the head of the motley army whom he has saved:
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said "He's come—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The other poems are far more ordinary in form and banal in language. Mr. Lindsay, at this stage, was writing like other people, and his verse was redeemed from commonplaceness only by its sincerity and high spirits. He is an "uplifter" who is as jovial as Falstaff; he is probably the only poet on record, except Shelley, to be a teetotaller, and certainly the only one to take an active part in an anti-Saloon campaign. The second best poem in this book is an elegy, in couplets, on O. Henry; an elegy both romantic and truthful. Of the others an address to the U.S. Senate is decidedly racy. A senator whom Mr. Lindsay regarded as undesirable was elected. His verses on the occasion begin:
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
That is what met the eyes of the newly-elected when he opened his local paper on the morning after the poll.
A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY, BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS OF THE WORLD WAR: 1914–1919. Edited by George Herbert Clarke. Hodder & Stoughton. 10s. 6d. net.
If this be a treasury it contains not merely gold and silver, but copper, nickel, Britannia metal, brass, and lead. Even if all the good poems inspired by the war were brought together they would not make a book of over four hundred closely-printed pages. Mr. Clarke is Professor of English in the University of Tennessee. His collection, amongst those who are sufficiently undiscriminating to like it, may promote Anglo-American friendship; if it does it will have justified its existence. Otherwise its only value consists in its reproduction of certain poems which are not, we think, to be found elsewhere. We believe that the Poet Laureate's Wounded (which appeared in the Times) is one of these. It is a very lusty poem inspired by Trafalgar Square in sunshine: wounded lads lolling by the lions and Nelson standing above. It ends:
The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow,
In his country grave of peaceful fame,
Must feel exiled from life and glow,
If he thinks of this man with his warrior claim,
Who looketh on London as if 'twere his own
As he standeth in stone, aloft and alone,
Sailing the sky, with one arm and one eye.
This poem—it is not the only one—was overlooked by those who were recently yelping at Mr. Bridges for having written nothing about the war.