And of flies staring
Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes.
And there are lines such as
Men there have been who could so grimly look
That soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames
Before their eyes, and the blood perisht in them,
which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's:
The frowning looks of fiery Tamburlaine
That with his terrour and imperious eies,
Commands the hearts of his associates.
And we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more philosophic passages:
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;
But search into the sacred darkness lying
Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast
Measureless fate, full of the power of stars,
The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.
We may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men of the stamp of Mr. Abercrombie, men for whom poetry is neither a plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or vague dreams; but a serious attempt to grapple with life through combined experience, thought, and vision. Long ago Meredith urged that if fiction was to go on living, it must give us "brain-stuff" and "food-stuff." But no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim for poetry; to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with intelligence, with common sense, and with virile passion.