and the other On a Dead Child: "Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee...."
So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing—
Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed—
Propping thy wise, sad head,
Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.
So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither hath he taken thee?
To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?
The vision of which I miss,
Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?
Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.
In Winter Nightfall there is all the complaint of ailing old age, in Pater Filio the passionate anxiety of parent for child; the normal, inevitable griefs and dejections are all here, expressed with gravity, yet always with poignancy. But normal and inevitable they are. One gets the impression that, beyond the "common lot," the poet has had few distresses. Intense joy—nobody has given it better definition than he—is as rare as intense sadness, but ordinarily he is happy, or at worst not uncomfortably melancholy, and the happiness has become more pervasive as he has grown older. He is the poet of a leisured country life, led by a sensitive physically healthy man, with whom the major things of life have gone well and who, in those circumstances, is temperamentally inclined to a grateful contentment.
V
Mr. Bridges has not made the easy appeal by violence of expression; and he has not made the easy appeal by violence of doctrine. If he has been less discussed than many inferior writers, it is not so much that he is without doctrine as that he is without novel doctrine and has never been a doctrinaire. Any noisy demonstrator with a new lie may attract attention, if it is only the attention of those who wish to dispute with him; and it is easier to dispute (or agree) with the man whose "views" are explicit than with him who leaves them implicit. The mere fact that Mr. Bridges's practical philosophy has been held by hundreds of millions of ordinary people in many ages does not prove that he has no philosophy. He is a Christian, but he says little about that. He is politically sceptical of systems, but he says little about that. He accepts life, with its pains and pleasures, and he is happy that his life has been cast in an ordered traditional civilisation. He sees life in proportion, with the greater goods clear: childhood, the love of a woman and of children, the beauty of the earth, days of peace, joyful work, friendship. He does not proclaim a way of life, but it will be easy for his critics to deduce one from his poetry: if he does not tell people how to enjoy life it is because he is too busy enjoying it himself, and if he does not expound his religion, it is because he probably holds it to be "the religion of all sensible men." He never loses hold of his settled philosophy. In depression he does not imaginatively revel in the gloom of a Universe gone black, but consoles himself out of his knowledge:
O soul, be patient: thou shalt find
A little matter mend all this,
Some strain of music to thy mind,
Some praise for skill not spent amiss.
In the peace of a churchyard he can write:
Nay, were my last hope quenched, I here would sit
And praise the annihilation of the pit.