Four Poets •
Challenge. By Wilfrid Gibson. (Oxford University Press. 3s. 6d.) The Flawless Stone. By Frank Kendon. (Cambridge University Press. is.)
Lost Planet, and Other Poems. By Dorothy Wellesley. (Hogarth Press. 6s.) Mother and Child. By Ida Graves. (Fortune Press. 5s.)
IT is noticeable that the long poem is returning to favour. Mr. Kendon's poem is an example. This poet, who rarely publishes, writes both in prose and verse with a lucid simplicity, so that a careless reader, looking into his work as into a spring-pond, sees the bottom and is unaware of the depth. In his mature work as in his earlier verse, Mr. Kendon is given to solitary, Wordsworthian contemplation, and his habit of spirit is to seek in nature the certainty and regenerative power which he finds only too inter- mittently in man. That being his outlook, he has found a congenial theme in The Flawless Stone, which is a poem on the theme " Nature is the Art of God," set by Cambridge University, who have awarded Mr. Kendon the Seatonian Prize. It is interesting to compare his spiritual findings in this poem with those of Mr. Eliot in his poem Little Gidding. By their different ways, both these highly sensitive musers upon the nature of man and his relationship to the seething universe come to a similar decision, but where Mr. Eliot does it with an accepted ritual, Mr. Kendon does it informally. But would not Mr. Eliot agree with the central argument of The Flawless Stone?
But shall I, fearless, break the rock Where crystals fall apart? Or stand and watch sunlight pour upon miles of windless seas? Or stoop to find on shore Among the brittle grit and wreck of time One flawless stone? What part have we in this?
If we take uti the stone, we mutely take up fear.
The other long poem is Mother and Child. It has distinction. Its author speaks with what Emily Dickinson called a " granite lip," hacking out from coagulations of massed words shapes of a general significance, with hard, monotonous chisel-strokes. The result is something rather in the Epstein manner, and we see Mother ,and child sit high in the airy chamber admitting 'none to their solitary rocklike pedestal and wide architecture all individual features being deliberately avoided.
Challenge is as perfect a collection of poems as Mr. Gibson has ever written—and that means a lot when one contemplates his lifework. The themes in this book are more universal, more signifi- cant, than he has sometimes used, and the result is a more com- pelling and lyrical authority in the work. The lapidary and epi- grammatic quality of Mr. Gibson's art, always concise and-objective, has given him a place in English poetry where he is likely to
stand permanently, along with Clare, Crabbe and Davies. Here is an example. One night he lay on my breast, One rapt swift-fleeting night ; Then marched away with the rest In the morning light : For I was only a woman, and so I had to let him go.
And now another's breast Holds him through endless night ; And he marches no more with the rest In the morning light:
For she is his mother, the earth, and so Need never let him go.
Dorothy Wellesley's collection of new poems contains a re- punctuated version of her noble poem Fire, with the addition of two lines which are more explanatory of the history of her central idea, but to my mind are hardly necessary. There is always a sense of self-torture about this poet, as though her conversion of thought into song were a physical agony. The result is sometimes a gesture in the void, Cassandra-like. Perhaps it was this that always attracted Yeats to her work. She says I believe in the agony, in the sweat of the wise, And in the crucifixion of Solomon,
and a close study of her work shows how desperate and deep-seated
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