POETRY
FLOWERS IN THE GRASS. By Maurice Hewlett. Constable. 5s. net.
In recent years Mr. Hewlett, who earned his first fame as a romancer, has been devoting himself most seriously to verse. And he has done a very remarkable thing. Two or three years ago, with perhaps twenty novels and several books of poems behind him, he brought out a long poem—The Song of the Plow—which was a new thing in poetry, and which was indisputably the finest thing he had done in either "harmony," an epical poem, which was as easy to read as an excellent novel, and as good to read the third time as the first. There were lovely detachable things in it, but it was most striking when taken as a whole, racy, muscular, original. He followed it with The Village Wife's Lament, a tragedy of the war, only less striking in so far as it was less long. We have here a collection of his recent lyrics. They have not the outstanding merit of those works on the larger canvas, but they are far superior to his early lyrics, and bear new witness after their manner to his late poetic flowering.
The poems are all rural: mainly Wiltshire, the ancient downs, the valleys, the villages, the spire of Salisbury. But, save for a few delicious fancies about flowers, they all contain the human too. Landscape for Mr. Hewlett, however beautiful, however forbidding, is always a background for human character and human history. On that great hill the ledges were planted with corn by primitive men; on that other the Roman sentries stood; in that field there is a ploughman whose eyes and hair and thews are Saxon. Quotation from him is difficult, because of the very largeness of his imagination; his details are so subordinate that, though he usually gets the phrase right in its context, he seldom gets the phrase arresting out of its context. Now and then he is gentler, his language more honeyed, his rhythms less rugged, and in poems like Summer Night he falls into a beautiful and a very "contemporary" music.
That, and Jacob's Ladder, and The Cedar, and the uncanny and impressive Chelsbury are among the best things in the book; the last two show his historic imagination at its best, economical though the expression is. But the best of all, we think, is In the Fire.
The fire burns low;
Now the dying embers
Twinkle and glow
Like village lights,
Seen from the heights
In dark Decembers.
There's the foggy gleam
From the Horse and Groom,
Where topers dream
In front of their liquor,
And candles flicker
As pipes allume ...
The whole village passes across the vision: the smithy, a pair in a farm, an amber blind with girls' shadows on it, a candle and one reading in a loft: the lights go out one by one till all is dark. It is a charming picture, and the stanza is beautifully suited to it. It is a pity that Mr. Hewlett mars it in places with a stumbling-block word or rhyme.
COUNTRY SENTIMENT. By Robert Graves. Martin Secker. 5s.
It must be confessed that the very title of Mr. Graves's new book awakes in us a feeling of pleasure. Mr. Graves has a flair for titles. We remember his Beside the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers with a sense that the author has always succeeded in getting a suggestion of his individual quality into the names of his books. In the volume before us Mr. Graves repeats some of his former successes. The poem A Frosty Night is a good example of that dialogue form which Mr. Graves uses with great skill, and in which we may see the influence of the old ballads:
Mother.
Alice, dear, what ails you,
Dazed and white and shaken?
Has the chill night numbed you?
Is it fright you have taken?
Alice.
Mother, I am very well,
I felt never better.
Mother, do not hold me so,
Let me write my letter.
It is a quiet beginning, and it looks very easy to do, but that appearance is deceptive. To write with economy and in an almost conversational tone without becoming flat and banal is extremely difficult, but Mr. Graves's hand rarely loses its cunning in those awkward passages of low emotional pitch which are unavoidable in any sort of narrative verse. When the pitch rises he has a remarkably sure touch and can give us a vivid picture without any of the elaborate, detailed word-painting which is the bane of so much modern poetry. What could be finer, for example, than the stanzas that follow those already quoted:
Mother.
Sweet, my dear, what ails you?
Alice.
No, but I am well;
The night was cold and frosty,
There's no more to tell.
Mother.
Ay, the night was frosty,
Coldly gaped the moon,
Yet the birds seemed twittering
Through green boughs of June.
Soft and thick the snow lay,
Stars danced in the sky.
Not all the lambs of May-day
Skip so bold and high.
Your feet were dancing, Alice,
Seemed to dance on air,
You looked a ghost or angel
In the starlight there.
Your eyes were frosted starlight,
Your heart fire and snow.
Who was it said, "I love you"?
Alice.
Mother, let me go!
Mr. Graves resembles Mr. W. H. Davies in the quiet freshness of his best work. If he has a fault it is that he is rather too apt to point a moral. He may have caught this—along with much of his rhythmic subtlety—from his study of nursery rhymes, but there is very little of it in the present book, which is full of the most charming fancy. Perhaps Mr. Graves's most characteristic work is to be found in such a poem as Vain and Careless, which begins:
Lady, lovely lady,
Careless and gay!
Once when a beggar called
She gave her child away,
and which continues in a quaint fantasy of thought and expression that is entirely Mr. Graves's own, and is an original contribution to modern poetry. One of the best poems in the book is called Thunder at Night, and it describes two children into whose dreams the real thunderstorm outside their house enters. The boy is dreaming of a bear, the girl of monkeys and snakes. The hot, confused feeling of the night is vividly suggested and then the poem suddenly ends with a stanza that is a complete change in temperature and beautifully suggests the approaching dawn:
They cannot guess, could not be told
How soon comes careless day,
With birds and dandelions gold,
Wet grass, cool scents of May.
The book is well named Country Sentiment, for it has much of the beauty and the fragrance of the countryside.
LINES OF LIFE. By Henry W. Nevinson. Allen & Unwin. 3s. 6d.
THE PEDLAR, AND OTHER POEMS. By Ruth Manning-Sanders. Selwyn & Blount. 3s. 6d.
SKYLARK AND SWALLOW. By R. L. Gales. Erskine Macdonald. 5s.
Of the authors of these three books of verse Mr. Henry W. Nevinson is the only one who has made a reputation as a prose-writer, and it is not surprising that his work should show the widest range of thought and expression. His poems maintain a high level of accomplishment; here, for example, is a sonnet:
A German Winter.
On leagues of solid land the snow lies deep,
The snow falls crumbling from the leaden sky;
All but the fir is white; with timorous eye
Strange little birds in at the window peep,
From frozen forests come; black rivers creep,
Shrunk with the cold till half their bed is dry,
Along the ice-hung ozier reeds, and by
The wooden villages with gables steep,
Huddled around their spires.
Oh, far away
A purple mountain rises from the sand
The golden sand beneath the golden day;
Down the bright steep the waterfall plunges free
From ledge to radiant ledge, and on the strand
Sounds the long murmur of the eternal sea!
But it is the accomplishment of a sensitive and highly-trained mind, accustomed to literary expression rather than the work of an original poet; none the less it reveals sympathies and perceptions which the author has not been able to put into his prose.
Mr. R. L. Gales is an old hand who has written a great deal of charming verse, which has been widely enjoyed by those who can appreciate smoothness and sweetness better than music, colour, and imaginative power. Mr. Gales has a genuine vein of feeling and real skill, as the following extract will show:
Long ago
In their towers
The clocks struck
Old hours
That went so slow
Long ago
In George Hubert's parsonage
The wood-fire of old apple-trees
It flamed and flared and flickered so.
Long ago
At Hampton Court in the mild sun
In the tall limes great clumps were hung
Of mistletoe
*****
Long ago
Peace has fallen upon the pain
The grief, the madness of these twain,
Lovely lovers by Love slain,
Long ago.
In some ways Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders' work is more ambitious than Mr. Nevinson's or Mr. Gales'; but if she essays more, she performs, if anything, less. There is evident in her work an ardent searching of the spirit and a philosophical tendency that are worthy of praise, but nowhere are her emotions and thoughts transmuted into poetry's gold by any magical touch. We have, in other words, much of the raw material of poetry spread out before us, but not poetry itself. Nevertheless, there is a distinctive quality in her work which has affinities with some seventeenth-century poems; it is present in the poem entitled Emotions, which begins thus:
Spirits to whom my lady's little world
Is but a tree of rest,
Whence birdlike free, ye rise and soar
Each on your several quest
Above the heavy hills that close around
My strip of ground,
but does not keep at that level.
It may be that Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders will achieve considerably more than she has so far succeeded in doing.
KOSSOVO: HEROIC SONGS OF THE SERBS. Translated from the original by Helen Rootham. Introduction by Maurice Baring. Historical Preface by Janko Lavrin. Frontispiece by Toma Rosandić. Blackwell. 4s. 6d. net.
The frontispiece of this volume is as crowded with names as a modern theatre programme; we looked at the top for "licensee" and "lessee." But, unlike the plays, the book is good. Serbia, which has several great cycles of epic-ballads, is the one country where the creation of poetry on primitive lines still flourishes; a cycle seems to be developing out of the retreat through Albania. The greatest group of all, however, is the group which grew out of the defeat (in 1389) by the Turks on the "Field of Blackbirds." The originals (and Miss Rootham's versions) are all in trochaic decasyllabics. They deal with one group of figures: the Tsar Lazar, who was killed; his wife Militsa; the hero Milosh Obilish, who stabbed the victorious Sultan in his tent; Jug Bogdan, his ten sons, and the traitor Vuk Brankovitch. The warriors march off, they are defeated, they die: ravens or other messengers carry the news to the stricken Tsaritsa in her tower: teamsters years after find the Tsar's head, still preserved in a well, and it miraculously joins the body. All a nation's sorrow is in these songs, all the great memories and defiant resolve, that kept the race alive and proud, and led the recapturers of Kossovo, in our own day, to fall to their knees on the sacred ground. The translation seems very good; the fire remains in the whole, but the magic has inevitably escaped from the parts. We can only quote a specimen at random:
To his feet leaps Milosh, that great warrior,
To the black earth bows himself, and answers:
"Tsar Lazar, for this thy toast I thank thee,
Thank thee for the toast and for the goblet,
But for those thy words I do not thank thee.
For—else may the truth be my undoing—Never,
Tsar Lazar, was I unfaithful,
Never have I been, and never will be.
And to-morrow I go to Kossovo
For the Christian faith to fight and perish.
FLEURS-DE-LYS. A Book of French Poetry freely translated into English verse. By Wilfrid Thorley. Heinemann. 6s. net.
We may heartily congratulate Mr. Thorley upon his ambition and his industry. He conceived the prodigious idea of giving English versions of poems by all the representative French poets from the earliest age until our own time. He has translated three hundred, and he has increased his labours by doing the earlier ones into archaic English. For example, his first specimen (twelfth century) is entitled The Twa Systres, and begins:
The mirk did fa' lang syne, lang syne,
When twa fond systres wi' hands that twine
Went down to bathe whaur the waters shine.
And Villon's most famous ballade opens:
O tell me where and in what lande
Is Flora and the Roman lass?
He knows his ground, and his selection of originals is admirable. But his versions usually take the bloom off. Baudelaire's
O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps, levez l'ancre
becomes
Haul up the anchor, captain old, O Death, for it is time:
which is the same thing with a difference. Sometimes he even fails to get essential parts of the sense. In recommending his book, therefore, to those many to whom such a survey in English would be useful, we warn them that the translations at best are graceful versifying. Mr. Thorley, happily, is usually on his own highest level, and the book can be read with very little annoyance and a certain amount of edification.
THE PATHS OF GLORY. A Collection of Poems written during the War, 1914–1919. Edited by Bertram Lloyd. Allen & Unwin. 4s. 6d. and 3s.
The title of this anthology is presumably ironical. He who would have a comprehensive selection of war poems reflecting the sentiments of the mass of our people, and most of the British soldiers, must go to Miss Jacqueline Trotter's Vision and Valour (Longmans'), which we shall review in our next issue. This collection is a collection with an avowedly propagandist aim. It contains poems exposing the cruelty and filth of War in general, which were inspired by the late War. It is not yet complete. For instance, Major Brett-Young's Bête Humaine might suitably have been included. But most of the poems included are genuine and well written. Amongst the authors "covered" are "A. E.," Paul Bewsher, Geoffrey Dearmer, Walter de la Mare, Wilfrid Gibson, Laurence Housman, Margaret Sackville, Siegfried Sassoon, Dora Sigerson, and Alec Waugh.