One does not put a poet like Mr Stephens into a group—it cannot be done. If you try to do it, weakly yielding a wise instinct to mere intelligence, one of two things will happen. You will return to your careful group the moment after you thought you had made it, to find either that Mr Stephens has vanished or that the others have. Either he has broken away from the ridiculous frail links which bound him, and is already disappearing on the horizon with a gleeful shout, or his unfortunate companions have vanished before so much exuberance.
That is why this poet was not included in the Irish chapter where, if the thing were possible at all, one would have hoped to catch him. There are many fine racial strands out of which you would think a net could be woven. They appear to enmesh an Irishman and an Irish poet. We think we recognize that eye, critical and appreciative, for a woman—or a horse. We believe we know that wit, with a touch of satire and another touch of merry malice. We are surely not mistaken in that adoration of beauty and its converse hatred of ugliness; while we have no doubt whatever about that passion for liberty.
But the true poet will transcend his nation, as he does his manhood, at times of purest inspiration; and Mr Stephens has those happy seasons—happy, surely, for those to whom he sings, though, doubtless, each with its own agony to him. In many of the slighter poems, however, all of them good and most of them quite beautiful, the signs of nationality are obvious. They are comically clear, in fact, proceeding as they do directly from the quick, keen perception of the Comic Spirit itself. Only a blessed simpleton whose name was Patsy, could see the angel who walks along the sky sowing the poppyseed. The word 'Sootherer' sounds like English; and indeed individuals of the species are not unknown in this country. But they, like the word, are native to the land of the born lover. Has anybody heard of a Saxon who could fit names like these to his sweetheart—Little Joy, Sweet Laughter, Shy Little Gay Sprite? or who could woo her with such a ripple of flattery—
... You are more sweetly new
Than a May moon: you are my store,
My secret and my treasure and the pulse
Of my heart's core.
But, on the other hand, no mere English boy could hope to match the glib rage of spite in this disappointed youth—
You'll go—then listen, you are just a pig,
A little wrinkled pig out of a sty;
Your legs are crooked and your nose is big,
You've got no calves, you have a silly eye,
I don't know why I stopped to talk to you,
I hope you'll die.
Again, no Jack Robinson, though the dull smother that he would call his imagination were fired by plentiful beer, could ever have conceived of "What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub"; or could have accompanied Mac Dhoul on his impish adventure into heaven, to be twitched off God's throne by a hand as large as a sky, and sent spinning through the planets—
Scraping old moons and twisting heels and head
A chuckle in the void....