11 AUGUST 1923, Page 20

POETS AND POETRY.

ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY.t

" No man loved the appreciation of his fellows better than O'Shaughnessy." If he read his poems aloud, from time to time he looked up for approval. " Like it, eh ? " he used to ask, and then, soothed and flattered, he went on reading. We can observe the same continual distrust of himself, the

• Yacht Racing. By B. Hezkstall-smith. London: Plaid Press Ltd. [12a. net.] t Poona of Arthur O'Shatighnnog. Edited by William Alexander Percy. Yale University Press. [105. net.]

same egotism and weakness, in his poems. Fretted by life, oppressed by a feeling of isolation and impotence, he tried to assure himself that, after all, he was among the great ; that he saw mighty visions, if only he chose to tell them. So, with an admirable technique, he wrote :-

" A common folk I walk among ;

I speak dull things in their own tongue : But all the while within I hear

A song I do not sing for fear—

How sweet, how different a thing I And when I come where none are near I open all my heart and sing."

So, too, in a more subtle way (for here he admits readers into his company), he wrote his most famous poem :- " We are the music makers

And we are the dreamers of dreams."

They are seductive and dishonest verses : they invite all that hear them into a universal and self-appeasing admiration society. Or, again, he magnifies himself by describing his struggles with " that hard tyrant Thought." Thought assaults him always ; cold sweat comes over his body ; there is no ease from him : " And, ere he leaveth me, he will have set A great eternal mark upon my face."

I wish I could reproduce here a photograph of Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

He never exploded into verse : he subsided into it. And yet he had many qualities of a good poet. The smoothness and dexterity of his metre, the quietness and distance of his echoes, are often delightful. He knew how to join and contrast his vowels and how to suppress his consonants. There is the technical reason for his lack of strength : it is the quarrel of consonants that gives life and masculinity to verse. Though he absorbed and imitated Swinburne and Keats and Blake, he seems also to prophesy, and we can note in hitn what we thought to be the distin- guishing cadences of later poets—of Yeats, for example, and Davidson. He is at his best in small sensuous descriptions : we may almost laugh to see such excess of sweetness go with such tenuity of meaning, but at least a prosodist must respect him. No quotation could represent him more favourably or more fully than " The Fair Maid and the Sun ";- "No task is hers for ever, but the play Of setting forth her beauty day by day : There in your midst, 0 sons of men that toil, She laughs the long eternity away.

She getteth up and maketh herself bare, And letteth down the wonder of her hair Before the sun ; the heavy golden locks Fall in the hollow of her shoulders fair.

She taketh from the lands, as she may please, All jewels, and all corals from the seas ; She layebh them in rows upon the rocks ; Laugheth, and bringeth fairer ones than these.

Five are the goodly necklaces that deck The place between her bosom and her neck ; She passeth many a bracelet o'er her hands ; And, seeing she is white without a fleck, And, seeing she is fairer than the tide, And of a beauty no man can abide— Proudly she standeth as a goddess stands, And mocketh at the sun and sea for pride."

Such things O'Shaughnessy could do as well as any poet and better than most.

He died in 1881, and this volume is the first adequate selection of his poems. Mr. Percy's introduction is excellent. If for each word of praise a less forcible word had been found, and for each word of blame a more thoroughgoing word, then it would stand as a model of criticism. This should imply that Mr. Percy's judgment is good, but that his proportion is a little out. And that is natural and by no means culpable in a critic who is attracting our sympathy. He shows a measure of restraint in saying nothing of O'Shaughnessy's life. It makes a sensational story ; and surely no one could be harmed now if it were -made public. Ai..tis PORTE&