IN PHAEACIA
Had I that haze of streaming blue,
That sea below, the summer faced,
I'd work and weave a dress for you
And kneel to clasp it round your waist,
And broider with those burning bright
Threads of the Sun across the sea,
And bind it with the silver light
That wavers in the olive tree.
Had I the gold that like a river
Pours through our garden, eve by eve,
Our garden that goes on for ever
Out of the world, as we believe;
Had I that glory on the vine,
That splendour soft on tower and town,
I'd forge a crown of that sunshine,
And break before your feet the crown.
Through the great pinewood I have been
An hour before the lustre dies,
Nor have such forest-colours seen
As those that glimmer in your eyes.
Ah, misty woodland, down whose deep
And twilight paths I love to stroll
To meadows quieter than sleep
And pools more secret than the soul!
Could I but steal that awful throne
Ablaze with dreams and songs and stars
Where sits Night, a man of stone,
On the frozen mountain spars
I'd cast him down, for he is old,
And set my Lady there to rule,
Gowned with silver, crowned with gold,
And in her eyes the forest pool.
It seems to me improbable that Flecker will be forgotten; he was a real poet. But a remark made of Tennyson is still more applicable to Flecker. "He was an artist before he was a poet." Even as a small boy, he had astonishing facility, but naturally wrote little worth preserval. The Collected Poems show an extraordinary command of his instrument. He had the orthodox virtues of the orthodox poet—rime and rhythm, cunning in words, skill in nature-painting, imagination. The richness of his colouring and the loveliness of his melodies make his verses a delight to the senses. His mind was plentifully stored with classical authors, and he saw nature alive with old gods and fairies. In one of his most charming poems, Oak and Olive, he declares,
When I go down the Gloucester lanes
My friends are deaf and blind:
Fast as they turn their foolish eyes
The Maenads leap behind,
And when I hear the fire-winged feet,
They only hear the wind.
Have I not chased the fluting Pan,
Through Cranham's sober trees?
Have I not sat on Painswick Hill
With a nymph upon my knees,
And she as rosy as the dawn,
And naked as the breeze?
His poetry is composed of sensations rather than thoughts. What it lacks is intellectual content. A richly packed memory is not the same thing as original thinking, even when the memories are glorified by the artist's own imagination. Yet the death of this young man was a cruel loss to English literature, for his mental development would eventually have kept pace with his gift of song. His cheerful Paganism would, I think, have given place to something deeper and more fruitful. Before he went to Constantinople, he had, as it is a fashion for some modern Occidentals to have, a great admiration for Mohammedanism. A friend reports a rather naïve remark of his, "this intercourse with Mohammedans had led him to find more good in Christianity than he had previously suspected." I have sometimes wondered whether a prolonged residence among Mohammedans might not temper the enthusiasm of those who so loudly insist on the superiority of that faith to Christianity. Mr. Santayana speaks somewhere of "the unconquerable mind of the East." Well, my guess is that this unconquerable mind will some day be conquered by the Man of Nazareth, just as I think He will eventually—some centuries ahead—conquer even us.
Flecker died so soon after the opening of the Great War that it is vain to surmise what the effect of that struggle would have been upon his soul. That it would have shaken him to the depths—and perhaps given him the spiritual experience necessary for his further advance—seems not improbable. One of his letters on the subject contains the significant remark, "What a race of deep-eyed and thoughtful men we shall have in Europe—now that all those millions have been baptized in fire!"