POETRY
FLOWERS IN THE GRASS. By Maurice Hewlett. Constable. 5s. net.
In recent years Mr. Hewlett, who earned his first fame as a romancer, has been devoting himself most seriously to verse. And he has done a very remarkable thing. Two or three years ago, with perhaps twenty novels and several books of poems behind him, he brought out a long poem—The Song of the Plow—which was a new thing in poetry, and which was indisputably the finest thing he had done in either "harmony," an epical poem, which was as easy to read as an excellent novel, and as good to read the third time as the first. There were lovely detachable things in it, but it was most striking when taken as a whole, racy, muscular, original. He followed it with The Village Wife's Lament, a tragedy of the war, only less striking in so far as it was less long. We have here a collection of his recent lyrics. They have not the outstanding merit of those works on the larger canvas, but they are far superior to his early lyrics, and bear new witness after their manner to his late poetic flowering.
The poems are all rural: mainly Wiltshire, the ancient downs, the valleys, the villages, the spire of Salisbury. But, save for a few delicious fancies about flowers, they all contain the human too. Landscape for Mr. Hewlett, however beautiful, however forbidding, is always a background for human character and human history. On that great hill the ledges were planted with corn by primitive men; on that other the Roman sentries stood; in that field there is a ploughman whose eyes and hair and thews are Saxon. Quotation from him is difficult, because of the very largeness of his imagination; his details are so subordinate that, though he usually gets the phrase right in its context, he seldom gets the phrase arresting out of its context. Now and then he is gentler, his language more honeyed, his rhythms less rugged, and in poems like Summer Night he falls into a beautiful and a very "contemporary" music.
That, and Jacob's Ladder, and The Cedar, and the uncanny and impressive Chelsbury are among the best things in the book; the last two show his historic imagination at its best, economical though the expression is. But the best of all, we think, is In the Fire.
The fire burns low;
Now the dying embers
Twinkle and glow
Like village lights,
Seen from the heights
In dark Decembers.
There's the foggy gleam
From the Horse and Groom,
Where topers dream
In front of their liquor,
And candles flicker
As pipes allume ...
The whole village passes across the vision: the smithy, a pair in a farm, an amber blind with girls' shadows on it, a candle and one reading in a loft: the lights go out one by one till all is dark. It is a charming picture, and the stanza is beautifully suited to it. It is a pity that Mr. Hewlett mars it in places with a stumbling-block word or rhyme.