When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof, and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven....
The accuracy of the description is extraordinary and continues as the town awakes, and boys go snowballing to school, a few carts creak along, and the pale sun rises to awake the noisier day. But the observation, the accuracy, the response of the heart to the beauty of the scene, might have been found elsewhere: the astonishing management of the rhythms, which, even when divorced from the meaning of the words, translate the steady falling, the wayward criss-crossing, the lightness and crispness, and soothing persistence of snow in an almost windless air, is peculiar to Mr. Bridges. Words and music are with him always inseparable: he is at the opposite pole from the man, often not unintelligent in other ways, who forces his material into a strait-jacket of jingle. In this respect his taste is as flawless, his subtlety as unfailing, as any in the records of literature.
III
It is possible, and it has often been stated, that Mr. Bridges will chiefly live as a poet of the English landscape. Certainly he would live if only his landscape poetry were preserved. It may seem a large assertion, but no Englishman has written so large a body of good landscape poetry. There are two obvious things to be said about it.
The first is that his landscape is the landscape of the South of England, more particularly of the Thames Valley and the downs by the sea—two regions which he significantly chooses as typical, when, in The Voice of Nature, he wishes to point an argument. He never describes foreign or remote scenes; and—it may be regarded as symbolic of his attitude to the more violent things of life—he never leaves the land for the sea. Even British territorial waters he never sails; there is much of the sea in his work, but it is the sea as seen from the shore, blue and smiling and dancing, or whipped by the wind, caught in a narrow peep between shoulders of the downs or watched from a hill through a telescope:
There many an hour I have sat to watch; nay, now
The brazen disk is cold against my brow,
And in my sight a circle of the sea
Enlarged to swiftness, where the salt waves flee,
And ships in stately motion pass so near
That what I see is speaking to my ear.
Mr. Bridges's landscape is bounded by the English Channel; his hills are the Downs; his rivers are clear and gentle streams; his trees oak and beech, elm and larch; he is as surely of the South of England as Wordsworth is of the North. And the second obvious thing is that, being a true landscape poet and not a romantic who exploits nature to find backgrounds for his passions, it is of ordinary landscapes that he writes. Tennyson, too, was an observer, but many of his best-known landscapes are of the selected kind. It is one thing to write of the sort of natural scene traditionally approved as remarkable: sunset on a marsh, sunrise on the Alps, stupendous cliffs, high cataracts, and breakers in the moon. It is another to describe, giving the breath of life to your description, what any man, going out on any day in any season, will see when he looks over a five-barred gate or takes a footpath through the woods. Mr. Bridges writes of nature like a countryman. His abnormal scenes are rare; he sees the beauty in the normal. He sings of nightingales when he hears them, but rooks are far more frequent in his verse; his suns seldom go down in flaming splendour, but drop red into the grey or die invisibly. One by one scenes from his familiar landscape have moved him to verse, until his books contain a complete catalogue of the English rural year, all its ordinary recurrent colours, and scents and sounds, trees, flowers, birds, skies and waters.
Spring. A village in the downs, and men winnowing in a barn. The palm-willows and hazels. The first flowers, primroses and green hyacinth spikes, shooting up amid moss and withered undergrowth. Brisk ploughmen. Birds happily courting in the jocund sun.
Summer. The garden, with bees on the flowers and in the overhanging limes, and rooks cawing in the elms. The hayfields in the sun; fields green with waves of rustling wheat; the hum of insects and the song of larks in a sky pure blue, or heaped with "slow pavilions of caverned snow," "sunshot palaces of cloud"; the downs, starred with small flowers, where rabbits nibble the grass; the noise of scythes. The river: still water, the dip of oars, a boat that glides with its reflection past flowering islets and dipping branches and meadows, where "the lazy cows wrench many a scented flower"; bathers; fish leaping in the pools; the peace of evening as it falls over water and trees; moonlight on the flashing weir. There are storms that blacken the sea and beat down the corn, but they pass and the sun comes out again, gathering strength.
Autumn. The garden in September, with late flowers. The ripe orchards and fields where "the sun spots the deserted gleanings with decay." The winds of October that come and fill ruts and pools with golden leaves. The later storms that mingle the leaves with snow.