New Verse

Visiting the Caves. By William Plomer. (Cape. 58.)

Bright Feather Fading. By Lilian Bowes Lyon. (Cape. 5s.) Reading the Spirit. By Richard Eberhart. With an Intro- ductory Essay by Michael Roberts. (Chatto and Windt's. Os.) MR. PLOMER'S poems raise in an extreme form the question of poetic diction. There is a general agreement that the language and idiom of prose should be used as muchuas po4ible. nu poetry, and Mr. Plomer observes this agreement more scrupu- lously perhaps than any other poet writing at present. The great virtues of prose arc clarity and exactitude of statement, and these Mr. Plomer's poetry has in a high degree ; but it has also another quality which does not belong to prose, that

is 'strictness of form. This clarity, this exactitude and this strictness of form unite to produce something which is con- gruous, original, and aesthetically pleasing. It is not prose turned into verse, for the form is as much an organic part of it as the clarity and the exactitude ; but it is seldom poetry either except in defiance of its own formula. A good example of it appears in the title poem, which begins

"Suddenly I discover in a wooded place That the trees are rooted in the hollow of your hand."

This sets the note for the imagery, and the second verse contintieS :

"The lift, tile gangway and the staircase lead to you, And you, iny bed and pillow, give me rest ; I visit the eaves and am guided, and I know Those galleries that are glittering within your breast' Whatever you receive I share And I carry you like a passport everywhere."

Here the sobriety and precision of statement are admirable ; the idea is difficult, the expression perfectly lucid ; one cannot read this verse without respecting Mr. Plomees refusal to

clothe his thought in a vague poetic mysticism. Yet if he had not pinned down his diction so ascetically, if he had allowed it to glow, one feels that the result would have been more appropriate. However; this deliberate avoidance of " poetry " must be accepted as a quality of Mr. Plomees poetry, and sometimes it produces an effect of great intensity, as in the fine poem, ". The Silent Sunday " : "Half-way down the hill a murder case One° drew. idle crowds to stare

Over the. mottled laurels in the garden of an urn, And, a newspaper stood up on end

And moved =Steadily urged by the wind,

Like a child that learns to walk."

The.closeness of this writing is admirable, and it makes every- thing in this volume worth reading.

Miss Bowes Lyon is in love with poetic diction, the modern

kind that derives from Hopkins, and she can always reproduce

it and sometimes create it. The beginning of her title poem is such dense Hopkins that one cannot criticise it :

"His light-embossed sheer breast All shattered, this sky-pest Is past, and sparrow man Can spy out the span Of beauty's wind-ply wing."

In "Men Climbing" a more modem idiom is copied with the same astonishing skill :

" The-terrible simplification of the summit, of the smooth ice wall Waits clinically on their courage, that is only the spider's courage Though it spin this absolute road."

This use of abstract nouns to describe particular concrete things has grown into an irritating thought-saving trick.

Yet "the whitening ultimatum" is skilful, though poetically worthless. Such skill, however, could be possessed only by a writer genuinely concerned with the potentiality and the beauty of words, and is a sign not of lack of originality but of an original talent which has not yet fully developed. One can recognise this clearly in the first lines of "For Dove Returning " :

" Cliffed summer, hazy wood, Dove's hang-fire height A long way falls, far off is shored By the still-water wheat, Full meadow's evening flood,"

where the last two lines, emerging from a synthetic Hopkins landscape, create a landscape of their own, which one feels is the writer's real country. " Duchess " is a very fine poem, though still uncertain. There is great richness in the last

verse of" Foami of Thistle," but it is a little excessive : "Here on a tideless foreshore, freight too long desired,

The beached and heavy sheaves confer with shades ; Out there a fanged and pirate fell is fired With changeling glory gleaned before it fades."

To detach Miss Bowes Lyon's own gifts from those derived from Hopkins is difficult at present, but there is no doubt of their existence or of their originality.

Mr. Eberhart employs a great deal of poetic imagery, but he uses it mainly for general moralising and the asking of shetoricid que,stions. This gives his verse a superficial look of richness, but the. imagery does not particularise. The reflective poem "The Groundhog," now well known, is probably the most satisfactory one in this volume, for it ties down a general conclusion to a particular instance. But one does not know what to say when Mr. Eberhart asks :

"Where stays

The abrupt essence and the final shield ? "

or when he asserts that •

"Blood, that built the heavy world, Curls in the shells it built, -

Thins and congeals. Its cold heart Would turn to the earth, its home."

These statements, are too summary, these questions too much in the air ; they require a point of reference to make them serious, and Mr. Eberhart does not divulge his point of refer- ence. There is potentiality in these poems, but that is all one