when no wind breathes or ripple stirs,
And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.
Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest' how much in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination was haunted. His world was a world of nursery ships and nursery caravans.
"Haunted" is, perhaps, an exaggeration. His attitude is too impassive for that. He works with the deliberateness of a prose-writer. He is occasionally even prosaic in the bad sense, as when he uses: the word "meticulously," or makes his lost mariners say:
How striking like that boat were we
In the days, sweet days, when we put to sea.
That he was a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination also tended to keep his poetry near the ground. His love of the ballad-design and "the good coloured things of Earth" was tempered by a kind of infidel humour in his use of them. His ballads are the ballads of a brilliant dilettante, not of a man who is expressing his whole heart and soul and faith, as the old ballad-writers were. In the result he walked a golden pavement rather than mounted into the golden air. He was an artist in ornament, in decoration. Like the Queen in the Queen's Song, he would immortalize the ornament at the cost of slaying the soul.
Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. The classical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of the noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preserved the ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as a sign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot be denied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. His book, indeed, is a treasury of beauty rare in these days. Of that beauty, The Old Ships is, as I have said, the splendid example. And, as it is foolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of his work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those gorgeously-coloured verses which begin:
I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,
With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;
And all those ships were certainly so old—
Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell-raked them till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.
But now through friendly seas they softly run,
Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,
Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.
That is the summary and the summit of Flecker's genius. But the rest of his verse, too, is the work of a true and delightful poet, a faithful priest of literature, an honest craftsman with words.