The Clumsy Blue Bird
Selected Poems. Idris Davies. (Faber. 7s. 6d.) Famous Meeting. Robert Gittings. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) A Mask for Janus. W. S. Merwin. (Yale. $2.50.)
A MORE serious problem than how to sell poetry, though it is less frequently discussed, is how to write it. How many men made poetry from war experience whom later years have shown up as artless or mute? The poetry of private experience needs a strong, preferably universal, occasion to cement its meaning. Now the times are propitious for nothing if not for a review of poetry itself, and a thoughtful study of how it may be written. This is no fruitless task of sterile self-consciousness, but involves analysis and reformation of words, from the meaning and rhythm of monosyllables to the meaning and construction of myths. When one notices that many of the younger poets are articulate in form but quite diffident in statement, it is heartless as well as inappropriate to sigh for the political rhetoric of a previous age, of which the late Mr. Idris Davies's Selected Poems forms a typical example: " Do you remember 1926? That summer of soups and speeches, The sunlight on the idle wheels and the deserted crossings
And the laughter and the cursing in the moonlit streets?"
The context of this kind of verse, the emotion of the political underdog, the inclination to sentimentalise the working man, has been removed or severely mollified by the Welfare State, and the poet has to look further into the nature of existence itself to make any original discovery. Mr. Davies wrote the kind of poem which sums up or pin-points the events of the year, the atmosphere of the time, in the manners of journalism, balladry and Auden. His are mostly portraits of people in the mining valley where he lived in Wales, sketches or skits, impressions of places, almost all with a political slant that is sometimes stirring, sometimes sentimental. His rhythms are occasionally swing-song or obvious, but broken and dominated by the statement whose genial object is to let us breathe the coal-dust on the slopes of Gwalia, share in the history and suffering of a people, and above all to have pity:
" 0 what is man that coal should be so careless of him,
And what is coal that so much blood should be upon it?"
But when the crisis behind a poem has passed, we look in poetry for, a residue, a formation, of truth that attains the potency of a symbol. Sometimes Mr. Davies's pity seems merely to fulfill the demands of a psychological habit. Its rhetoric is modelled ultimately on the prose of the Bible, with verse cadence and pairs of echoing statements. But the pity is not sufficiently interesting to hold us, and the structure of the verse falls to pieces over the hollows of thought. Ideally verse should be held together by joinery of thought and feeling as well as line and polish of form; Mr. Davies's work is mainly personal statement of a descriptive and emotive kind._ It makes one think, good as it is, that something more than personal emotion in a social context is needed if Netry is to retain a serious attention.
Mr. Robert Gittings takes us a long way from Wales, and also from poetry. On first reading, one is surprised by the agility and conversation-spontaneity of the title poem Famous Meeting, a dramatic monologue of Wellington recounting an imaginary meeting with Nelson. This is deliberately, almost skittishly, "after '1 Browning, poetry in which the lyrical intelligence is almost mute, giving place to the strident, matter-of-fact notes of argument or debate. Mr. Gittings seems excessively garrulous in his narratives, and might learn more from Landor than Browning. His indifference to ugliness of sound, as if the verse were railway-sleepers to be stamped or leaped upon, is alarming. He has a talent for fiction or melodrama, a type of statement which appeals to, or hits, the stomach, and can invent or colour a situation, such as Boswell in the light of the London Journal, as skilfully as a historical novelist. This good quality is spoiled because he does not use words with their proper poetic force. Second-hand or second-rate words are useless in poetry, and their conquest or control should be the poet's elementary and also his ultimate practice. The study of words becomes trivial and morbid unless directed towards meaning, and combined with an equally forceful study of people and things. We must be sceptical of finding in the present world a system of thought, such as Aquinas gave Dante, a harmony of ideas, in which every moment of experience, or temporary expedient, may find eternal significance. But though we cannot expect to find such a system or myth, it would be poetic suicide to give up the struggle of sorting and building. The apocalyptic tide of the war years is at low ebb, but many young poets are still attracted to myth as a release from the egocentricity of personal or occasional poetry. Mr. W. S. Merwin, a young American poet who lives in England, is sometimes densely mythical. In this first volume, which presumably contains much early work, he uses the symbols of myths for the vague resonance they contain. In poetry it is more important that a statement of interest and value should be made in original or newly experienced language, than that some vague stimulant should be given to the senses by a group of second' hand symbols. Mr. Merwin at his worst is precious, literary and effete. At his best he has a sense of mystery, a fine delicacy of technique, and his use of language is deliberate and novel. But his myths should be forged into facts, given clear edges, and shown in hard light. A sensitive poem on Herons may exemplify what IS needed: " As I was dreaming between hills
That stones wake in a changing land, There in the country of morning I slept, and the hour and shadow slept."
The birds talk in the poet's dream, but they are not herons. They have no connection with that clumsy blue bird, easily overcome by seagulls, which, if its throat is fastened with string, can be made to catch fish, or which sits so long at the water's edge that a weasel may climb on its back to suck its blood. On such household facts a myth of the heron may be built.
There is no surer way, if we intend to build a harmony of meaning with words, than to start with what we know, and finish with some•
thing that may become intelligible. RICHARD MURPHY.
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