This may not be good poetry, but it is an admirably concise epitaph of the age.
Sometimes she escapes into riotous, wanton imagery as a refuge:
"Moonlight flows over me,
Spreads her bright, watery hair over my face,
Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes
Wreathed with syringa, and plaited with hyacinths;
Hair of the moonlight falling about me,
Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain."
But in the end she comes back, gloriously sure of herself, in a poem which is worthy to stand by the one I first quoted:
"I know what happiness is—
It is the negation of thought,
The shutting off
Of all those brooding phantoms that surround
As dank trees in a forest
Cutting the daylight into rags,
Caging the sun
In rusted prison bars.
Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge
And make no song,
But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,
The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,
The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill:
Opening wide the violet-petalled doors
Of every shy and cloistered sense,
That all the scent and music of the world
May rush into the soul.
And happiness expands
The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,
For moth-like fancies winged with evening,
For dove-breasted silences,
For shadowy reveries
And starry pilgrims ...
I know what happiness is—
It is the giving back to Earth
Of all our furtive thefts,
The lurid jewels that we stole away
From passion, sin and pain,
Because they glittered strangely, luring us
With their forbidden beauty.
Because our childish fingers curiously
Crave the pale secrets of the moon
And grope for dangerous toys.
Happiness comes in giving back to Earth
The things we took from her with violent hands,
Remembering only
That her dust is our garment,
Her fruits our endeavour,
Her waters our priestess,
Her leaves our interpreters to God,
Her hills our infinite patience."
That is a brave cry: "I know what happiness is." Happy indeed is the man or woman who has found this elixir of life—thrice happy is the poet who not only has found it, but is able to give exact and musical expression to the discovery. Iris Tree has matured: we watch her in the process of discarding her childish things.... When next we read her we shall find a full-fledged poet. There is earnest already of great things to come. That is why we should read her now. To watch a poet try her wings, soar and fall, only to soar again, is to be counted one of life's finer joys.
IV
THE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the "neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual. His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an obstruction in his pursuit of beauty.