Alfred Noyes
Collected Poems. By Alfred Noyes. (John Murray. 2is.)
IT is good to have Mr. Noyes's poems in a single volume, and see in perspective the ambition and the span of his work. Three facts emerge quickly. The first is that his personality as a poet, strongly marked at the outset, has undergone little change. The second is that, almost alone in our time, he has carried on the older tradition of narrative in verse. (Mr. Wallace Nichols is the only other poet whose name suggests itself in the same context.) The third is that, for good or ill, Mr. Noyes determined his vocabulary in an age remote from the present, with the result that most of his poems seem to be as it were in costume. This makes him a lonely figure. For company he must look back to another lonely figure, William Watson :—
" Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire. Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire."
This is his place, rather than with Chesterton, in spite of the ballad- metres and the frequent community of interest. But in his most important works, such as Drake and Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, he is by himself, a poet telling stories as if there were no films, no novels even, but.the poet was still the natural and the only story- teller.
It would be insolent to try to appraise a life's work in two or three paragraphs. Fitter, and more courteous, for a reader who has owed much pleasure—and, from an admirable and too little- known anthology met in boyhood, The Temple of Beauty, derived both insight and discovery—to give thanks ; and to reflect that personality and faith, though their speech fall from fashion or never hit it, are a poet's best passports on his voyage across the years.
L. A. G. STRONG.
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