Poetry

The Old Knight. By Herbert Palmer. (Dent. is. 6d.)

Epitaphs and Occasions. By Roy Fuller. (Lehmann. 6s.)

PLODDING through the wastes of modern verse—book after book with its solemn or arch dedication to relations or friends and the publisher's assurance that here at last is work of significance—the reader mayeask himself again what he really wants from poetry. Three things at least, he may decide, are necessary. A poet must have something to say ; he must have an individual voice ; and the texture must, in choice of words and rhythm, sustain the close attention that should be given to verse. Or, cutting the knot of criticism, the reader may just decide that he wants something that he can read and re-read—something in which he can take pleasure even when it has become part of his memory. On either of these criteria nine-tenths of modern verse fails.

The writers noticed here are none of them of great stature, but they are less dull than most, and they have integrity. Mr. Palmer is in some sense a voice out of the past—a curious mixture of the .late eighteenth century (for ht s idol is Blake) and the simplicities of the Poems of Today period This means that at least his verse is readable aloud One may compare his bare:

"And in that moment I was knit With all that was and is to come Death dwindled, and the sky was lit With light that struck discordance dumb."

with Mr. Fuller's clotted poem on Knole:

"The firedogs dangerous weapons, beds tents, rooms an insect's maze, But nothing burns, loves, spies, through rain- or history-nervous days."

Mr. Palmer is redeemed from the commonplaces of verse by a robust violence and extravagance of fancy. He invents a dirge for man, sung by "those wild cats of the sky, buzzard and falcon, hawk and kite." He puts six white archangels at the devil's death-bed and writes of souls "captained by their fleas." What he has to say is very much what other poets have said—that the world faces destruction because man "only wanted usefulness" and "missed the .blue uplifting hour "—but his better poems have individual twists of thought (" All are wronged who walk alone ") and he has his moments of vision. Here, again, he is of an earlier age—in direct communication with his God instead of working with the symbols of faith.

Mrs. Bellerby's verse has much more mark of the mid-century. De la Mare is her master, but she uses loose rhythms and rhymes: "Stabbed by God's bright Ghost

Pierced by immortal dagger—

See the returning Stranger Turn his face towards the broken east." and she is occasionally obscure through insufficient explanation of her symbols. She has a fine, narrow sensibility. Quiet among the sights of the country—dawn, a hot day, water, birds—she broods on death, children and love, employing the symbols that are perhaps over-used today—the Holy Ghost, resurrection, bread and wine, the chalice—but otherwise using words precisely and delicately. Mrs. Bellerby is worst where she is trying to be cynical in the modern manner—which is seldom—and best at her moments of perception of a beautiful world and something beyond it.

Henry Bly consists of three short plays in free verse, the first based on a folk-song and the second on a Grimm story, while the third is a fantasy to be acted in church. All show a decent simplicity of diction, and the title play with its saint and soldier is entertaining. The trouble is that the plays are echoes of something else all the time—Eliot, Giraudoux and the rest. An odour of sanctity and symbolism hangs over all. The prompter communes with the audience ; figures of modern life, such as financier and publisher, mix with visionary beings whose identity is not clear: There are no real people • all are puppets voicing truths that may be profound but are wrapped in Eliot phraseology:

"The park of memory closes, the chairs are locked away And whatever we expressed Is quickly forgotten, soon to be attempted again."

It is time, one feels, for something different ; and yet Mrs. Ridler is efficient in the genre. Roy Fuller, in contrast, is not concerned with heaven and hell. With his verse dedication to friends and his left-wing politics, he is a voice reminiscent of the 'thirties. He comments on war, suburbia, literature, ancestry—indeed, anything that comes to hand, for he has no central poetic experience. He is, of course, cynically dissatisfied:

"In the good society Morbid art's not necessary.

It's a sick subhuman voice Comes from Kaflca, Proust and Joyce."

But there is a jaunty honesty about his work that is like a north wind after the incense of some modern poetry.

And perhaps anybody writing any kind of passable verse today

should be congratulated GWENDOLEN FREEMAN.