6 AUGUST 1932, Page 18

Michael Drayton

The Works of Michael Drayton. Vol. II. Tercentenary edition, to be completed in 5 volumes. £7 17s. Od. the set. Edited by J. William Hebei. (Shakespeare Head Press, Oxford.) "HE wants one true note of a poet of our times, and that is this, he cannot swagger it well in a tavern, nor domineer in a pot-house." Thus wrote young, contemporary Cambridge of Michael Drayton. It seems a curious and somewhat irrelevant grievance to nourish against a poet, but the words "a poet of our times" are perhaps significant. Such qualifications a4 dominance in a pot-house were important to the Elizabethan

and even the Jacobean mind. Yet Drayton was -manly enough, direct and objective enough, as his robust though now unreadable epics testify. His car was not always -above reproach, though he was careful, too careful, to observe : "That ev'ry lively Ceasure

Shall tread a perfect Measure, Set on so equall feet,"

and his load of scholarship at moments becomes intolerable, peppering his pages with marginal notes and references ; but of the author of Agincourt and The Virginian Voyage it can never be said that here was not a virile muse.

This second volume of the tercentenary edition reproduces Drayton's own collected and corrected edition of 1619. Drayton, like many another minor poet, is one who has both suffered from and benefitted by the modern short-cut of the anthology. Few lovers of poetry, however ardent, will be willing to wade through The Barons Warres or England's

Heroicall Epistles. We should not advise them to do so. Even those two strange compositions, The. Owls and The Man in the Moone, are scarcely adapted to an impatient modern taste. But the Odes with other lyrick poesie-s may be read with delight, and indeed it surprises me to find that some of them should have escaped the attention of our avid anthologists, At least four if not five pieces among the Odes might find a worthy place : "To the New Yeere," "-To his Rivall," "The Cryer," "To his coy love," and "His defence against the idle Critick," with its most pertinent suggestions. But, by the usual irony.of a poet's fate, Drayton owes such immortality as he possesses to the one sonnet, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part." A first-class sonnet indeed; and even that has been attributed by some to Shakespeare.

Drayton has, in fact, enjoyed the usual share of good-luck and ill-luck. He dedicated the whole of a fairly long life to poetry ; he obtained a reverberating success among his con- temporaries. That his name should live to-day on the merits of one sonnet is perhaps no more than a poet should exact. For the production of one perfect sonnet, sixty years is perhaps little room.

Why, then, is it so difficult, with the best will in the world, to read through Drayton's collected works ? Some of them are impossible, and would defeat the sturdiest interest ; but every now and then the page clears as though a ray of light had fallen across it. He had, I think, a complex mentality. The solemn and the fantastic were curiously and contrarily mixed in him. It is almost incredible that the author of Nimphidia and of the Heroical! Epistles should be one and the same person. The pedant and the poet were at war. The pedant over-charged his pages with scraps of information better adapted to an encyclopaedia than to poetry ; as when he relates of the crane : " . . . . fearing some rough flaw,

With sand and gravel burdening his craw, Noted by Man, which by the same did find To ballast ships for steadfastness in wind," and then again can write of himself : "My verse is the true image of my mind, Ever in motion, still desiring change ; And as thus to variety inclined, So in all humours sportively I range. My muse is rightly of the English strain, That cannot long one fashion entertain."

Ben Jonson himself recognized this passion for information in Michael Drayton. He detected, for instance, Drayton's accurate and constant reference to the birds of the air :

"I thought thee then our Orpheus, that woulds't try Like him, to make the air one volary."

Ben Jonson was a little uneasy about Drayton. He thought he had not proved himself friendly enough to Drayton. Drayton's muse, however, was rightly of the English strain. Pedantry east aside, he could write such lines as these :

"Clear had the day been from the dawn, All chequered was the sky, Thin clouds like scarfs of cobwebbed lawn Veiled Heaven's most glorious eye.

The wind had no more strength than this, That leisurely it blew, To make one leaf the next to kiss, That closely by it grew. The rills that on the pebbles played, Might now be heard at will ; This world the only music made, Else everything was still."

Here is no pedantry. But it must be admitted that among the quicksands of boredom there are only a few solid places. They are, however, worth reaching.

V. SACHVILLE-WEST.