Studies of Contemporary Poets

by Mary Sturgeon

Money ... woman ... money!
I want naught with their money.
I want my husband,
And my children's father.
Let them pitch all their money in the furnace
Where he ...
I wouldn't touch a penny;
'Twould burn my fingers.
Money ...
For him!

There are fishermen in peril of the sea; the printer, the watchman, the stonebreaker, the lighthousekeeper, the riveter, the sailor, the shopkeeper; there are school-children and factory girls; outcasts, tramps and gipsies; and a splendid company of women—mothers in childbirth and child-death, sisters, wives and sweethearts—more heroic in their obscure suffering and toil than the noblest figure of ancient tragedy. With deliberate intention, therefore, the poet has set himself to represent contemporary industrial life: the strata at the base of our civilization. He has, as it were, won free at a leap from illusion, from a dominant idealism, and the jealous, tyrannical instinct for mere beauty. Life is the inspiration now, and truth the objective. The facts of the workers' lives are carefully observed, realized in all their significance and faithfully recorded. Sympathy and penetration go hand in hand. Personal faults and follies, superstitions and vices, play their part in these little dramas, no less than the social wrongs under which the people labour. And the conception, in its balance and comprehensiveness, is really great; for while on the one hand there is an humiliating indictment of our civilization (implicit, of course, but none the less complete) on the other hand there is a proud vindication of the invincible human spirit.

Viewed steadily thus, by a poetic genius which has subdued the conventions of its art, such themes are shown to possess a latent but inalienable power to exalt the mind. They are therefore of the genuine stuff of art, needing only the formative touch of the poet to evoke beauty. And thus we find that although the normal process seems to have been reversed here: although the poet has sought truth first—in event, in character and in environment—beauty has been nevertheless attained; and of a type more vital and complete than that evoked by the statelier themes of tradition.

As might have been expected the new material and method have directly influenced form; and hence arises another distinction of these later works. The three parts of Daily Bread and the play called Womenkind are the extreme example; and their verse is probably unique in English poetry. It has been evolved out of the actual substance on which the poet is working; directly moulded by the nature of the life that he has chosen to present. The poems here are dramatic; and whether the element of dialogue or of narrative prevail, the language is always the living idiom of the persons who are speaking. It is nervous, supple, incisive: not, of course, with much variety or colour, since the vocabulary of such people could not be large and its colour might often be too crude for an artist's use. Selection has played its part, in words as in incidents; but although anything in the nature of dialect has been avoided, we are convinced as we read that this is indeed the speech of labouring folk. We can even recognize, in a light touch such as an occasional vocative, that they are the sturdy folk of the North country. There is a dialogue called "On the Road" which illustrates that, as well as more important things. Just under the surface of it lies the problem of unemployment: a young couple forced to go on tramp, with their infant child, because the husband has lost his job. That, however, inheres in the episode: it is not emphasized, nor even formulated, as a problem. The appeal of the poem is in its fine delineation of character, the interplay of emotion, the rapid and telling dialogue—the pervasive humanitarian spirit; and, once again, an exact and full perception of the woman's point of view. Mr Gibson is a poet of his time in this as well—in his large comprehension and generous acknowledgment of the feminine part in the scheme of things. I do not quote to illustrate that, because it is an almost constant factor in his work. But I give a passage in which the Northern flavour is distinctly perceptible, in addition to qualities which are limited to no locality—the kindliness of the poor to each other and their native courtesy. An old stonebreaker has just passed the starving couple by the roadside and, divining the extremity they are at, he turns back to them:

Fine morning, mate and mistress!
Might you be looking for a job, my lad?
Well ... there's a heap of stones to break, down yonder.
I was just on my way ...
But I am old;
And, maybe, a bit idle;
And you look young,
And not afraid of work,
Or I'm an ill judge of a workman's hands.
And when the job's done, lad,
There'll be a shilling.

.....

Nay, but there's naught to thank me for.
I'm old;
And I've no wife and children,
And so, don't need the shilling.

.....

Well, the heap's down yonder—
There, at the turning.
Ah, the bonnie babe!
We had no children, mistress.
And what can any old man do with shillings,
With no one but himself to spend them on—
An idle, good-for-nothing, lone old man?

The curious structure of the verse is apparent at a glance—the irregular pattern, the extreme variation in the length of the line, the absence of rhyme and the strange metrical effects. It is a new poetical instrument, having little outward resemblance to the grace and dignity of regular forms. Its unfamiliarity may displease the eye and the ear at first, but it is not long before we perceive the design which controls its apparent waywardness, and recognize its fitness to express the life that the poet has chosen to depict. For it suggests, as no rhyme or regular measure could, the ruggedness of this existence and the characteristic utterance of its people. No symmetrical verse, with its sense of something complete, precise and clear, could convey such an impression as this—of speech struggling against natural reticence to express the turmoil of thought and emotion in an untrained mind. Mr Gibson has invented a metrical form which admirably produces that effect, without condescending to a crude realism. He has made the worker articulate, supplying just the coherence and lucidity which art demands, but preserving, in this irregular outline, in the plain diction and simple phrasing, an acute sense of reality. Here is a fragment of conversation, one of many similar, in which this verse is found to be a perfect medium of the idea. A wife has been struck by her husband in a fit of passion: she has been trying to hide from her mother the cause of the blow, but she is still weak from the effects of it and has not lied skilfully. Her mother gently protests that she is trying to screen her husband: