Out of the golden-green and white
Of the brake the fir-trees stand upright
In the forest of flame, and wave aloft
To the blue of heaven their blue-green tuftings soft.
Out by the ricks the mantled engine stands
Crestfallen, deserted—for now all hands
Are told to the plough—and ere it is dawn appear
The teams following and crossing far and near,
As hour by hour they broaden the brown bands
Of the striped fields; and behind them firk and prance
The heavy rooks, and daws grey-pated dance:
As awhile, surmounting a crest, in sharp outline
(A miniature of toil, a gem's design)
They are pictured, horses and men, or now near by
Above the lane they shout lifting the share,
By the trim hedgerow bloom'd with purple air;
The long dark night, that lengthens slow,
Deepening with Winter to starve grass and tree,
And soon to bury in snow
The Earth, that, sleeping 'neath her frozen stole,
Shall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole
Of how her end shall be.
The best of all (such as The Downs and The Storm is Over) cannot be quoted except entirely; they are landscapes complete, earth and sky. But let it not be supposed that Mr. Bridges is ever a mere describer who sits down mechanically in front of any scene with his little box of water-colours. We have known such, and sometimes they have been learned in botany; their exactitude of detail is dull, their serried statements useless; only the man who is touched by the beauty in a scene, or aroused by a scene to an awareness of beauty behind it, will fuse the several things he sees into a whole. The writer who has felt no emotion communicates none, and the greatness of Mr. Bridges's poems of landscape is derived not solely from his knowledge of landscape, the wary eye, but from his feeling for it, the eye of love. His scenes are precise, but they are never photographs; there is no doubt about the sentiment that he felt when he saw them.
IV
And Mr. Bridges, even when at his best, is not only a landscape poet, but a poet cunning in the experiences of the heart. Very many of his poems are love poems and many of them are beautiful: if the fact has not been widely observed it must be because they are happy love poems, or at least because they are not excessive in expression. The proclivity that makes him, in another sphere, write not about storms but about calms after storms, is seen always: he has no violence, no vehement abandonment. But there is little of that in Wordsworth and other poets the depth of whose affections, the reality of whose suffering, cannot be doubted. Mr. Bridges's love-poetry makes no brutal assault on us. His constant reference to Virgil, Mozart and the old composers is significant. He never declaims, never raves, despairs, or burns in print: but he knows the ways of lovers' hearts, and his quiet stanzas, whether their subject be the pain of doubt, or separation, or the joy of union, or calm affection by the warm domestic hearth, have a truth and strength which outwear the ardours of many poets. In When My Love was Away, My Spirit sang all day, I will not let thee go, and twenty more he lover's calendar is written as that of the seasons elsewhere, and if his praise is soft and measured like the old music in which he so constantly delights, love's fine extravagance is, for all the tempered sound, nevertheless there:
Her beauty would surprise
Gazers on Autumn eves,
Who watched the broad moon rise
Upon the scattered sheaves.
He is self-controlled and never shouts; he does not hunt the universe for new and strange sorrows nor harrow himself overmuch with the problems of existence; but those griefs that fall to the common lot of mankind have come to him and drawn beautiful poetry from him. Many poets have written habitually of Death; few have said as little about Death as Mr. Bridges; but he has said all he has to say and need say about death, loss, and sorrow in two poems, the poem which begins:
I never shall love the snow again
Since Maurice died,