POETS AND POETRY.

MR. D. H. LAWRENCE'S WORK.• MB. D. H. LAWRENCE seems, at any rate for the present, to have come to the end of his poetical utterances. The novelist, and still more the philosopher, was always inclined to shoulder the poet, and now, for the time being, seems to have ousted him. Mr. Lawrence has had a considerable influence upon other modern writers, and it is perhaps not uninteresting in this pause of his career to endeavour to estimate the nature of his contribution to modern lyrical poetry. For reasons of space, I propose to leave out of consideration the long narrative poem, " Look, we have come through." In the first place, on coming back to Mr.

Lawrence's poems, we shall probably be struck by their vigour. The emotional stress is often tremendous. We feel that the con- tent is, as it were, always bursting out of the skin of the poem. The inspiration was apparently, as a rule, too white-hot to submit to the bonds of a regular metre. Often there was not even time for any symbolism. The poem is a naked, direct statement. Take the following. It seems devoid of every quality that we expect in verse except emotion, and yet who can deny it the title of poetry ?

" And if I never see her again ?

I think, if they told me so,

I could convulse the heavens with my horror.

I think I could alter the frame of things in my agony. I think I could break the system with my heart.

I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break."

This directness often gives to the poems a curious flavour that we associate with very different productions—Mr. Waley's

exquisite translations from the Chinese. They have the same naked simplicity, but their writers have come to it not from stress and agony of emotion, but from niceness and satiety, and a taste purged and refined through the centuries.

What do we have to pay for this tensity, this veritable vibra-

tion, in Mr. Lawrence ? As we should expect, his poems, or rather his mental attitude, seem to be without sense of propor-

tion and his work seems to be done without consciousness. He is struggling so hard to give utterance to some burning emotion that his verse often becomes tortured and harsh—a contortion rather than a poem. The more violent the emotion of which he writes, the more we are conscious of a febrile quality in the verse. He can never stand back from his passion. Therefore we often find that his most passionate love poetry, remarkable as it is, is so feverish, so contorted, as to be pathology, not literature.

We have perhaps been moved and duly caught into the swing of the poet's mood, and then Mr. Lawrence lets his fever get the better of him and lets himself slip into what is something very near to delirium—too near, at any rate, to be expressed

in half a dozen lines. And so it is that we find the paradox that Mr. Lawrence often • writes best upon what are to him emphatically secondary subjects. Two poems about children in

Amore, for instance, are extraordinarily beautiful and well observed, especially perhaps the one which begins :-

"When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind," and which ends :-- " I long for the baby to wander hither to me

Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water, So that she can stand on my knee With her little bare feet in my hands, Cool like syringe buds, Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers."

But whatever may be Mr. Lawrence's faults, thia poem illustrates

• doom Poems. By D. H, Lawrence. London: Duckworth. his chief virtue. He is never negligible. His poems have an intense objective existence. To borrow a most repulsive expression from the jargon of the stage, they are always " strong." There appears to be no civilized expression which gives the notion conveyed by the phrase, " Punch back of it." And yet this is a quality of which we are particularly conscious in poetry. There are delightful poets whose works are singularly wraith-like. They may be admirable and charming, but we feel that they are akin to Herrick's daffodils and fade away so fast that we must use a sort of cunning in relation to them—must stalk them. Per contra, there are poems which we may like much less ; they are often dull or unsubtle, for instance, but they are, as it were, irrevocable. This vigorous life belongs, in a high degree, to Mr. Lawrence's lyrical poetry. It is this lesson of strength that he has to impart to younger writers. Nevertheless, his decision to express himself in prose for the moment may very likely be