THE POETS TRANSPLANTED

By HELEN SIMPSON

T CAME to England first in April, 1914. We had broken 1 the journey in France, which meant that the approach to London was made through Kentish gardens ; and I remember the astonishment with which I surveyed the little fields and orchards scampering by. Out of the rich soil houses seemed to grow like trees ; it all looked settled for ever, permanent under the fleeting veil of the spring. I saw England for the moment as Elfland, and myself as True Thomas in the ballad. Then a feeling of compassion over-" came me, thinking of the country where I was born.

It was D. H. Lawrence—it would be a stranger—who pointed out that Australia was not a new continent, but an old one, the oldest in the world, a sanctuary for forgotten races of animals and men. The trees and undergrowth are wiry rather than luscious ; they have for months, perhaps years at a time, to do without rain. The grass follows no season ; it follows the rain, whose performance keeps no day. The leaves on gum trees, grey, sickle-shaped, are the same summer and winter. Instead of field flowers, great flocks of highly-coloured birds descend on the pastures in spring ; they stay an hour or two, then are off and away. It is an old, colourless, waterless continent. Capricorn is its tropic, the Goat, which governs with violence and incon- stancy. Flood and fire ; distances ; deadly stillnesses ; sudden damaging changes after long monotony. That was, and is, Australia.

I perceive now, as I did not in 1914, how great is the pride of Australians in their English heritage. Too great, perhaps. At school I learnt the lyrics of English poets ; but whereas to English children these lyrics are echoes of a reality— echoes almost inaudible to town children, horns of effland very faintly blowing—to me they were for the most part pure fantasy :

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang Upon those boughs which slake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

That meant nothing. What time of year did Shakespeare mean ? Our leaves were always grey. Bare ruined choirs—, well, Shakespeare lived fifty years after the destruction of the monasteries ; it was a natural simile for a Warwickshire man to choose ; but what significance could it have for children in a country where the churches were too new to fall down The song of Ver in Love's Labour's Lost—we learned that, too :

"The cuckoo then on every tree Mocks married men —"

We had no cuckoo, and the song, so far as we were concerned, might have been written in Choctaw. Nashe's Spring was another favourite with governesses, who explained to which birds the notes belonged : "Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, towitta-woo."

We could see no sense in it. Our birds had utilitarian names; jackass, knife-grinder, coaehman ; a translation of Nashe's refrain into Antipodean bird-song might run : " Crew-whiss,' ha-ha-ha-ha, tu-snap, ching !"

What matter ? The emotional content of the English lyric does not vary with season or setting. What difference, then, can it make to the appreciation of a poem if the birds, trees, seasons, are unfamiliar overseas ?

It makes this difference. It makes of the poem's reader an outsider, a foreigner, one for whose benefit editors arrange copious notes at the back of school editions of the classics. English writers do use Nature and their own familiar sur- roundings as a kind of frame, taking them for granted, and expecting their audience to do so, too. The Canterbury Pilgrims start off under April showers. Milton, calling upon the Sicilian muse, casts flowers from Buckinghamshire hedge- rows upon the Laurent Herse where Lycid lies.

English people, wisely enough, refuse to look closely at their own poetry. (Vaghezza, the old Italian word for beauty, is one for which our language ought by now to have found an equivalent.) But viewed from the other side of the world, the England of the Oxford Book of Verse is as fantastic as that country to which the Queen of Elfland led Thomas Rhymer, the garden green whose springs run blood.

I am speaking now of lyrics. Prose is another matter. The authorised version of the Bible, for instance, comes alive for us as it can never do for people living under grey skies. We know what it is to pant after the water-brooks ; summer makes our rivers wildernesses, our fish stink because there is no water ; every simile of David and Isaiah strikes home.

I have seen with these eyes the pillar of cloud that marches by day, a column of dust sixty feet high, moving across Bathurst plains at the rate of a cantering horse. The pillar of fire, too ; it springs from the hollow trunk of a gum-tree, and the air is too still to sway the flames, which mount without breaking. Dried watercourses to which animals have come too late may stand for Ezekiel's valley of dry bones. These are all happcnings, pictures that we know. But we can only guess at the circumstances in which English- men sing of love and spring—guess, and by some love's labour of the imagination, arrive at comprehension.

I believe that Antipodeans score in the long run by this inability to take the poets for granted. We have to make an effort each time we sit down to them. A country where houses are rooted like oaks, where autumn is golden, where snow falls, where every foot of ground has been trodden and laboured by man—this demands a strong act of faith on the part of those who walk (upside down) among primeval fauna. And faith has its reward. By that strong impulse of the mind, the magic casements are thrust a little wider open. 11 est dangereux de se pencher au de/ors.

All the same, the perilous seas sound their warning in vain for some of us. We cross them, taking six weeks to do it, in the attempt to verify by observation truths which already we know by faith ; and find ourselves staring at authentic primroses, or banks whereon the wild thyme actually grows. A penalty, of which nobody is aware until it is too late, is imposed upon those who are found thus wandering within the Queen of Elfland's borders, the same that was put upon True Thomas :

Speak ye word in Elfinland

ne'er win back to your am n countrie."

That is a hard saying, but the Queen is not one for senti- ment, and faith ought to have been enough. It is now some twenty-three years since I travelled hopefully and innocently through Kent. I have spoken too many words by this time. I shall never, now, win back.