To take the first of the three—spontaneity, Gordon was above all things a natural singer. This naturalness, this unforced quality, is undoubtedly his first and his finest merit. He hoped for nothing—at least for nothing tangible—from his verses. In one sense, he did not wish to write. He much preferred action. If some one had given him a troop of cavalry and shown him a battery of opposing artillery, he would, in the rush and forgetfulness of one wild, sweeping movement, have experienced more real life, more real pleasure, than he was ever destined to know. Such an experience might have laid once and for ever the ghosts that always haunted him; might have made him feel that he was born to act, as his soldier-fathers had acted, instead of being obliged to sit down in a strange land and listen to memories of action that sang fitfully through his brain. It is for this reason—for the reason that temperament, and heredity, and poetic impulse forced him to find relief in verse whether he wished to or not, whether he was proud of the performance or ashamed of it—that he occupies his unique place. The pen and ink processes are invisible in his best work; it is as though
A wistful, wandering zephyr presses
The strings of some Æolian lyre.
To illustrate the spontaneous manner of Gordon would be to run through a complete list of his published poems. There is no need to go much further than the opening lines of The Rhyme of Joyous Garde. It is instructive to notice how in this, as in others of his poems, the picture seems to create itself:—
Through the lattice rushes the south wind, dense
With fumes of the flowery frankincense
And hawthorn blossoming thickly.
No preparations, no apologies, no preliminary turning and scraping; only the rush of a few lines which sweep the reader, whether he likes it or not, into the enchanted world of dreams. Equally natural, and quite as resistless, is the sentiment of Podas Okus. Here again we feel, so to speak, the pulse-beat of the inevitable; we get again the impression that Gordon could not help the writing; that he himself, and not the Greek, is lying at a tent’s entrance; that for him the hues of sunset are blending with the brief glories of an almost vanished life; that it is he, and not Achilles, who murmurs to the golden-haired Briseis:—
Place your hand in mine, and listen,
While the strong soul cleaves its way