POETRY
FLORA. By Pamela Bianco. Verses by Walter de la Mare. Heinemann. 25s. net.
Miss Bianco is twelve years old—at least she was when these drawings were made. There is a sameness about them. Almost all of them contain a rather languishing female face, with something of a primitive Madonna about it and something (if we dare suggest it) of the sophisticated 'nineties. In the coloured and in the more elaborate of the black-and-white pictures the faces are framed in setting of conventional but charming flowers, with, as Tennyson would put it, here and there a rabbit. The drawings are unreservedly amazing for a girl of Miss Bianco's age; if her future progress were to be on a par with her present precocity she would become one of the greatest artists in the world. We cannot assume that; nor, on the other hand, need we rummage in our notebooks for ancient generalisations about the fate of ancient prodigies. Miss Bianco is remarkable now; and she will be what she will be. If we were predicting we should say that she would become a very skilful and charming decorator, a more complicated Kate Greenaway.
She has at least performed one great feat already: she has provided little platforms from which Mr. de la Mare's Pegasus has sprung into the æther. We can imagine nothing which could more finally illustrate how small suggestions may germinate in a poet's mind than the verses which Mr. de la Mare has written to these so slight, so purely decorative pictures. His imagination has been coloured and excited by every smallest hint of a mood; and where, to the passing observant eye, Miss Bianco has left nothing more to be said to the little she has stated herself, anything, a droop of the eyelids, an indicated detail in the background, serves to send Mr. de la Mare off dreaming into remote fairylands. Behind one of Miss Bianco's damsels, slit-eyed and straight-fingered, is a path leading to a small crude building. The wind bloweth where it listeth. On this small thing, missing girl and child and leafy tree, Mr. de la Mare's eye has rested. The outlines have filled in, atmosphere has trembled in, sounds and lights; and the outcome is something of which Miss Bianco never dreamed:
Is it an abbey that I see
Hard by that tapering poplar-tree,
Whereat that path hath end?
'Tis wondrous still
That empty hill,
Yet calls me, friend.
Smooth is the turf, serene the sky,
The timeworn, crumbling roof awry;
Within that turret slim
Hangs there a bell
Whose faint notes knell?
Do colours dim
Burn in that angled window there,
Grass-green, and crimson, azure rare?
Would from that narrow door
One, looking in,
See, gemlike, shine
On walls and floor
Candles whose aureole flames must seem—
So still they burn—to burn in dream?
And do they cry, and say,
"See, stranger; come!
Here is thy home;
No longer stray"?
The poem Suppose, which appeared in our first number, starts on its fantastic flight from a face with eyes of wonderment in it; and from another head—a head crowned, a neck girdled—comes The Comb, perfect in itself without any picture:
My mother sate me at her glass;
This necklet of bright flowers she wove;
Crisscross her gentle hands did pass,
And wound in my hair her love.
Deep in the mirror our glances met,
And grieved, lest from her care I roam,
She kissed me through her tears, and set
On high this spangling comb.
Mirage is lovelier still, and far more slender in its origins; how Mr. de la Mare's imagination can fill out an outline that really is given is shown in his delicious poem of Master Rabbit. There is a charming sketch: a rabbit, and nothing more. But to the poet a whole scene comes up, country scents, green grasshoppers talking:
And wings like amber,
Dispread in light,
As from bush to bush
Linnet took flight.
He sees the rabbit looking out from the shadow-rimmed mouth of his shady cavern at sunset. Rabbit sees him:
Snowy flit of a scut,
He was into his hole;
And—stamp, stamp, stamp,
Through dim labyrinths clear—
The whole world darkened,
A human near.
This is an extra number to Peacock Pie, and the poems as a whole make us once more impatient for a collected volume of Mr. de la Mare's work which will show the bulk and the quality of the performance of one of the most exquisite artists in words who has ever contributed to the unequalled treasury of our English lyrics. Nevertheless it must be admitted that his average level is higher when he is not writing verses to a series of pictures.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH VERSE, 1616–1660. Edited by H. J. Massingham. Macmillan. (Golden Treasury Series.) 3s. 6d. net.
Mr. Massingham collects here four hundred poems written, with few exceptions, in the forty-four years that followed the death of Shakespeare. It may not be correct to describe this period as the most neglected period of English literature. It is true that many of the authors and most of the poems to be found in Mr. Massingham's collection have been ignored by anthologists, and are utterly unknown to the reading public; but we suspect that the periods of Anne and the Georges have been even less thoroughly searched, though they would not yield results so rich as those which have come from the claim that Mr. Massingham has staked out. There were great poets in that period; it left us many poems by Milton, Herrick, Herbert Vaughan, Cowley, Crashaw, Lovelace Suckling, and Carew which are familiar to every reader at all interested in English poetry. Had the obvious best been always selected Mr. Massingham would have found himself crowded out with stock pieces before he began. He has therefore—since he desired mainly to give publicity to the unfamiliar—left Milton and Herrick out altogether and excluded some of the best-known poems of their nearest rivals. This has given him room for everybody, or at least for a hundred and more poets, for Nabbes and Festel, as well as for the poets above mentioned, for Donne, and for such other respectable poets as Brome, Bunyan, Cartwright, Corbet, Davenant, Denham, the Fletchers, Habington, Bishop King, Massinger, Jasper Mayne, Quarles, Randolph, Shirley, T. Stanley, Traherne, Waller, Wither, and Wotton. It is an imposing array; contemplating it one realises that if that age could not vie with the Elizabethan in the number of great works produced, it actually beat it in the number of men it produced who wrote a few, or many, good short poems. And it had, as Mr. Massingham rightly says, a quality of its own. It may be difficult to deduce "tendencies" from this mass of metaphysical, amorous, graceful, jocular, scholarly, tripping verse. But at least the age was no mere afterglow. There are very few poems in this fine selection which could have been mistaken for products of any other generation, and there are few which are mere degenerate imitations of the songs of an earlier race. There was, under Charles and Cromwell, a distinct civilisation with a colour and a mind of its own; less passionate (save, in some quarters, in the matter of religion) than the last; less certain in its music; more self-conscious in all its ways: but genuine and, temperately, ardent, cheerful, chivalrous, genial, often tender. From the one pole of
What a dainty life the milkmaid leads!
to the other of
I saw Eternity the other night,
it covered, in its manner, the whole range of poetic experience and expression, and it did many things perfectly. Herrick and Vaughan were its typical products, and neither, in his sphere, has an equal.
We find no material fault in this most admirable and enjoyable anthology. We may, however, make in passing a few unimportant comments. Mr. Massingham, as we have said, has covered the ground more exhaustively than we had any right to expect; and for most of his important omissions he accounts satisfactorily on the ground that he does not want to reprint poems which everyone already knows. There are, however, a few things which he might have included. The selection would have been more thoroughly represented had it contained more of the controversial element. "I suppose," he says, "that my political temper would urge me to declare for the Parliament in the Civil War. But a bruising disunion of feeling would arise were such a choice forced upon me. Before the Civil War the middle and upper classes in England were highly educated and passionately drawn to music. Turning over these old Song-books, printed fifty years after their Elizabethan prototypes, one feels a horror at the men who violated the temples of song and learning. For the Puritans killed the musical soul of England and paved the way for our doom—the triumph of the business sense." That is as may be: at all events he who regarded Royalism as the devil would have to admit that, not forgetting Milton and Marvell, the devil had most of the best tunes; and there is a lilt about many of the Rump songs that equals anything in English polemic verse. Cleveland, in fancy, might have been more freely drawn on. Politics apart, there are things missing. A selection from Joseph Beaumont is given, but where is that beautiful poem about the "sweet fury" of Mary Magdalen? One poem of the mysterious Anne Collins (it is only, we think, one edition of her works of which a unique copy is supposed to exist; there was a second) is given, but not the best. Orinda is done scant justice; and another woman (not a genius, but as good as some of Mr. Massingham's men) who deserved quotation, however brief, is Anne Bradstreet, the Tenth Muse, the Female Homer and what not, of New England. The admission of Philip Ayres, who was twenty years out of date, is not really justifiable. Granted that he was old-fashioned in style and spirit, the same might be said of some of his Restoration contemporaries. Dr. Walter Pope's celebrated poem, for instance, would not have been out of place in a volume which contains Thomas Jordan and might have contained Martin Parker. A few of Mr. Massingham's copious and highly entertaining notes invite controversy. It is cruel of him, so tender as a rule towards small poets who have patches of goodness, to describe Flatman as a poetaster; it is rash of him to declare that a good Alexandrine must have a noticeable cæsura; and it must surely have been a moment of aberration which led him to detect "a superb freedom of imagination" in the ordinary tropes of Lord Herbert's Elegy:
Doth the sun now his light with yours renew?
Have waves the curling of your hair?
Did you restore unto the sky and air
The red and white and blue?
Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your death
That sweetest breath?
These things, however, matter little.
We note, by the way, that Mr. Massingham, like his predecessors, is unable to contribute anything new to the discussion concerning one of the noblest of the poems that come under his survey. We refer to "Yet if His Majesty our Sovereign Lord," which was discovered by Mr. Bullen in Christ Church Library. Mr. Bullen conjectured Vaughan as author. Mr. Massingham, with all deference, says that Mr. Bullen is wrong. We agree with Mr. Massingham; but we should greatly like this problem to be cleared up.
A MISCELLANY OF POETRY—1919. Edited by William Kean Seymour. Palmer & Hayward. 5s. net.
This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr. Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr. Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence here of poets who are not known to have written anything of any merit and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.
However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his Micah so peculiarly rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton's Ballad of St. Barbara has glorious lines, and the spirit is the spirit of The White Horse, but ballads should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr. Chesterton's Elegy in a Country Churchyard:
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home,
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas, for England
They have their graves afar!
And they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas, for England,
They have no graves as yet!
The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in Mr. John Drinkwater's Malediction. Mr. Gibson contributes a series of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr. Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good, if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible as they look. The editor's Fruitage is too much like the more pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but his Siesta gives a hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon, Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whose Poems of Conformity, difficult but sinewy, should be better known than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr. F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It concludes:
For here and hence I sail
Alone beyond the pale,
Where square and circle coincide,
And the parallels collide,
And perfect pyramids flower.
Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any useful purpose.