NEW POETRY

The Earth Compels. By Louis MacNeice. (Faber and Faber. 6s.) Memory and Other Poems. By Walter dela Mare. (Constable. 6s.) Poems. By Eileen Duggan. (Allen and Unwin. 5s.) Memoir, 1887-1937. By G. Rostrevor Hamilton. (Heinemann. 5s.) Poems. By C. H. Peacock. (Chatto and Windus. 3s. 6d.) . . . the engine is left running. By Blanaid Salkeld. (Gayfield

Press, Dublin. 5s.)

MR. Louis MACNEICE is the most actuel of these poets. Here

we have an intelligence and a sensibility in more of a quandary than any other poet worried only by the departure of youth, the evanescence of love, the transitoriness of what is desirable, and all the old bag of tricks. The poet is certainly grateful for " sunlight on the garden." He is delightfully skilful in evocations of place, atmosphere, and occasion—Ulster

" The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine, The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon ; Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon,"

or the Hebrides : " On those islands The tethered cow grazes among the orchises And figures in blue calico turn by hand The ground beyond the plough, and the bus, not stopping, Drops a parcel for the lonely household Where men remembering stories of eviction

Are glad to have their land though mainly stones— The honoured bones which still can hoist a body,"

or a football match : " Gilbert and Sullivan music, emerald jerseys."

He has.his private woes to take about with him. It is June, but " If only now you would come I should be happy Now if now only."

He is on a voyage,

" And when I think of you, my dear, Who were so near, so near, so near, The barren skies from wall to wall Appal, appal, pall, pall."

He is at home, but

" 0 my dear, go away

From the crags of memory."

What is more important than all this, is that the poet is afraid. He is haunted by the fears that have been haunting us all —fears of war, the future, regimentation, the unknown—

and it looks as if these fears are the making of him as a poet. What he perceives, enjoys, feels, stands out in relief like a palace of varieties against a thunderstorm.

" Out there lies the future gathering quickly

Its blank momentum ; through the tubes of London The dead winds blow the crowds like beasts in flight from Fire in the forest."

But we are offered more than a hint in the meantime that

we must make a " gesture," however " minute," for " the assertion of human values." It is not simply our duty, it is our only chance. With much technical resource as a poet, Mr. MacNeice is busy making his gesture. He drinks his friend's health "before

The gun-butt raps upon the door;"

he asserts human values and cultural ones as well ; he is even quite often " decidedly pleased not to be dead " ; he enjoys himself and communicates his enjoyment. No piece here is more characteristic than " Bagpipe Music," a brilliant essay in gay despair. The disillusionment of the nineteen- twenties seems to have been replaced by a sort of jolly stoicism, a graceful toughness. Mr. MacNeice does not burn his candle at both ends : I see him lighting it at one end and, while he dances a jig, holding it up with remarkable steadiness to illuminate a background of horrid newspaper headlines.

Mr. de la Mare is less urgently concerned with the here- and-now. In his new volume may be discerned a wish to recover the freshness of vision natural to a child, and a constant delight in children and in images of brightness, clearness, neatness, and tranquillity, like " the meteor's arc of quiet,"

the moon, the movements of birds, or the " beads of air " on the stem of a rose in water. His gift for delicately saying much in little sometimes makes his poems seem- to have sprung from an impulse akin to that which produces the Japanese

hokku : here is even a tribute to that old cynosure, the blossom of the cherry. But he is not less effective when graver : " Oh, climb thou down from fool's disdain ; Stoop thy cold lips to rag and sore ; Kiss the gaunt cheek while yet remains Life's blood in it. Ay, hearken ; again

Thou art the thief, the murderer,

The outcast. at thy door."

To the verses- of Miss Duggan of New Zealand Mr. de la Mare has written an. introduction. In it he says that the presence of poetry can.never be proved ; discovers, in some quotations from Miss Duggan, " a minute but unfaltering fingerpost ".; and adds some remarkably warm words of praise. The admiration felt by admirable poets for other poets is sometimes as hard to share as the esteem in which one's friends hold their friends : one recalls what a wagging of heads and tongues was caused by some of Mr. Yeats's preferences in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. I can discover little more in Miss Duggan than some conventional prettinesses. She says something to Mr. de la Mare that I can't hear, at least as poetry. On the other hand I could name at least two other New Zealand poets who seem to me considerable but who, for all I know, would leave Mr. de la Mare cold.

Mr. G. Rostrevor Hamilton has a quiet and exact taste and tends more naturally than many poets to the epigrammatic, as when he writes pointedly " On a Modern Prophet "

" His heavenly cities beacon from afar. How charming and how numerous they are, Each hastening its predecessor's fall, While this unheavenly earth survives them all "

or when he tells us that the one thing which the " jangling " nations always have in common is " the catholicity of tears "

" Whose eloquence at last may teach And reconcile them each to each."

The devotional mind can be the noblest, for instead of being degraded by suffering, its attention becomes more intently fixed on the superb image that it holds to be the truth.

Mr. Peacock is likewise concerned about the survival of spiritual values. He believes that " in the present cm' is in the world's history" that survival "rests with the artist,"

and that " only when the individual is creatively related to

society can that society be sane and progressive." But is society ever sane ? And towards what, on this " unheavenly earth," can it be progressive ? Whatever the answer, Mr. Peacock has a nice eye to note

" the violet burning dimly In corners where the leaves have gathered."

It is a pity that he should have written " as when for you and I Each bud-brimmed tree becomes a sign," but for you and me this is a small blemish.

Miss Salkeld's book is aptly named. The engine is left running, and one gets an impression that it is, most of the time, not in gear : there is activity, busy cerebration and a .palpitating devotional impulse, but headway is not made and the scenery does not seem to be going past as it should.

WILLIAM PLOMER.