POETS AND POETRY.
MR. JOHN FREEMAN'S POEMS.•
THERE seems little to add to the general verdict of the critics who have pronounced upon Mr. John Freeman's collected poems. The appearance of the book is undoubtedly something
of an event. Mr. Freeman certainly in his moral and aesthetio austerity stands in great contrast to most of his contemporaries. He is, to state the contrast geographically, Scandinavia to the average Georgian's Southern Spain.
His effects, both metrical and combined, are pale in tone, but they are intricate and subtle, so finished often as to seem rather things of -the slow growth of nature than the improvisations, the hit and miss creations of man. But the critics have for the most part left their readers under the impression that there is some- thing repellent in the austerity, difficult in the subtlety, and that the book in general is one to admire rather than to read.
This is surely an error ; there are many readers who in certain moods and some readers who in all moods prefer the moon
" mild and sober " before tho " glaring orb." The present writer, for instance, confesses himself fantastic enough often to read by the calendar—Chaucer and Dunbar for the early spring, Elizabethans and Rupert Brooke for early summer, Donne and perhaps Aldous Huxley for August ; Wordsworth,
Matthew Arnold and Milton for the autumn, and Pope and Dryden for the winter. To these might now be added Mr. Freeman, and his month would he February. It is difficult to make a quotation from Mr. Freeman's work which will enable the reader to judge of its curious attraction. The following is the first stanza of a long poem called " Beeehwoods." It at least gives an idea of the elegiac quality of the verse and of its rythmie subtlety :— " iteur me, 0 beeches ! You That have with ageless anguish slowly risen From earth's still secret prison Into the ampler prison of uery blue. Your voice 1 hear, flowing the valleys through After the wind that tramples from the west.
After the wind your boughs in new unrest Shake, and your voice—one voice uniting voices A thousand or a thousand thousand—flows Like the wind's moody ; glad when he rejoices In swift-succeeding and diminishing blows, And drooping when declines death's ardour in his breast ; Then over him exhausted weaving the soft fan -like noises Of gentlest creaking stems and soothing loaves - Until he rest, And silent too your easied bosom heaves."
The first poem in the book is, though the reader will be misled
• Poems Old and New. By John Freeman. London : Selwyn and MOW,. Ins. 6d. not.]
if he imagines it typical, so exquisite that it must be quoted. Alas that space forbids an extract long enough to display the delicate boldness of Mr. Freeman's complex use of refrain !- " Rose-bosom'd and rose-limb'd
With eyes of dazzling bright
Shakes Venus mid the twined boughs of the night ; Rose-limb'd, soft-stepping From low bough to bough Shaking the wide-hung starry fruitage—dimmed Its bloom of snow By that sole planetary glow."
We wish that Mr. Freeman would more frequently essay a style which he handles with such grace.
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