| I. | “Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green And her white hands and neck were a sight to be seen.” |
| II. | “Mary’s robe was rich pasture, her neck and her hands Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands.” |
The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in it as the second, although in the first the mantle is definitely called green and the lady’s hands and neck, white, while in the second no colour is mentioned at all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap painting-book; the green paint has only come off the cake in a thin yellowish solution and the painting-book instructions for colouring the hands and neck were “leave blank.” The second robe derives its far richer colour from the texture that the pasture simile suggests; the flesh parts get their whiteness from the suggestion of sun shining on water.
XXV
PUTTY
THE conscious part of composition is like the finishing of roughly shaped briars in a pipe factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, putty has to be used in order to make the pipe presentable. Only an expert eye can tell the putty when it has been coloured over, but there it is, time will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence now than the man who put it there. The public is often gulled into paying two guineas for a well-coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of putty under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to ten shillings or so.
It is only fair to give an example of putty in a poem of my own; in writing songs, where the pattern is more fixed than in any other form, putty is almost inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheerfully enough:—
Once there came a mighty furious wind
(So old worthies tell).
It blew the oaks like ninepins down,
And all the chimney stacks in town
Down together fell.
That was a wind—to write a record on,
to hang a story on,
to sing a ballad on,
To ring the loud church bell!
But for one huge storm that cracks the sky
Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by,
And the only wind that will make me sing
Is breeze of summer or gust of spring
But no more hurtful thing.
This was leading up to a final verse:—
Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word
As I myself must tell,
For none but I have seen or heard
My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred
For one who loved her well.
That was a word—to write no record on,
to hang no story on,
to sing no ballad on,
To ring no loud church bell!
Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart
Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart,
So all the song that springs in me
Is “Never a sweetheart born could be
So kind as only she.”
Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and had to finish the poem consciously as best I could. On picking it up again, apparently I needed another middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as the first, to prepare the reader for the third. Searching among natural phenomena, I had already hit on drought as being a sufficiently destructive plague to be long remembered by old worthies. This would make the second verse.
So without more ado I started:—