Herbert Palmer's Collected Poems
Mn. PAIMER'S poetry has been given " a rotten show." You rarely find it in our generous anthologies of the best few- score living poets. Yet in the background of even those who neglect him is a misgiving lest posterity may find him more interesting than poets they have praised continually. Mr. Robert Graves, who never squandered his esteem gave him a large measure. Robert Bridges, who had little use for modern poets, also made him an exception. If the Greeks were right, that " The Gods are known to their fellows," Mr. Palmer may comfort himself under the pontiffs' neglect. - This neglect has been carried very far beyond the degree in which, by repressing too easy belief in his own excellence, it may be thought to do a poet good. Mr. Palmer's poetry has suffered by haste and unhappiness. Sometimes he rants, sometimes follows what I think bad models, sometimes fills in with rhymes as slapdash and irrelevant as Mr. Masefield's. But what other poet has his power of triumphant impro- visation ? His spirit and choice are both Northern ; he judges of himself, aptly, as a " skald " ; and the fire and swing of his best verses are unsurpassed. What I think his greatest poem, Song of Job and Solomon, is tremulous with ecstasy of both suffering and surrender : " To-night the Abyss has hold of me;
I fear the menace of the Beast.
There sits a scowl on yon dark sea,
A quivering gale blows from the East. r
Hear me, thou Spirit of Wonder and Light ! And yet I fear thee and thy boon ! For I am like a starless night, And thou art brighter than the moon ! "
He is the most individual of living poets, and one of the noblest. His lapses are from formal excellence, not from the spirit of poetry. Yet the formal excellence comes also, when his daemon speaks through him. The Shepherd is ordinary speech and quiet satisfying " speech-rhythms " sublimed into the simplicity of inspired verse—and suddenly, reaching out beyond itself, ease becomes pleading invocation :
" Come, little David, come now down, Quit for awhile the skies ; Rim through the streets of London Town, Lend unto all your eyes.
Come with the waters the angels quaff
From the rivers beyond the moon ! Come with your bright harp and shepherding staff Soon . . . Soon!"
How much calls out for quotation—Hell-Gate Moor :
" Unto her banquet come bright butterflies, The mottled grouse, and moths with straining eyes, And the red fox with leisured gait of gloom ; And will-o'-the-wisps and glow-worms light their globes, The brown elves dance upon the mushroom lobes ! "
Ecstasy : Any Practical Idealist : Put on, frail ghosts : The Re-Birth of the Soul : Ghost Garden : Aftermath of Storm and War 1 In an age when poets have to be reviewers, novelists, general hacks of literature, Palmer has been unable to be anything but what his stars intended :
" Am I not one with Solomon,
Asaph and David, hands of fire The psaltery of the ages gone Was not more plangent than my lyre."
EDWARD THOMPSON.
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