Gems and Coloured Glass
Irish Doric in Song and Story. By Alfred Perceval Graves. (Fisher Unwin. 6s.) IT is surely a heartening sign when, out of a batch of eight volumes of verse, we can point to four of them as being single-poem books. After a decade that has been as prodigal of slender lyrics as an April tree of blossoms, it looks as if contemporary poets were turning to the longer narrative forms once more. That argues gathered strength of sustaining purpose. Can it be, then, that we are emerging from the period of • experiment and apprenticeship at last, with all aorta of new tools in our hands, understood, mastered ?
Or is it that our poets, vocal as ever for the inarticulate heait of the people, are being compelled into the longer more-embracing forms of verse by an increasing spirituality in the land ? Certainly this is what all the first four books mentioned above might argue.
Miss Sackville-West gives us modern Georgics as redolent of Kent as ever Virgil's were of Mantua. The cycle of the seasons is her theme ; and she has packed them with such wealth of coloured lore, such pictures of exact observation, and such a richness of intuitive understanding of the peasant- mind that we might say who carries her poem with him into a foreign land carries all the best of England in his pocket. Perhaps The Land leans a little to the gloomy side ; but, then, the particular county of which the poet is singing is Kent, clayey Kent. Strewn across her rhymed strong pentameters are some of the most charming lyrics Miss Sackville-West has yet given us ; but it is for the way in which she has revealed here the spirit of the English peasant (who, coming and going all year amongst the beauty of the living fields, inarticu- lately, almost unknowingly, yet sucks therefrom the grace that informs his heart and mind till they work to a single purpose), that our best gratitude is due. She knows, too, what the townsmen have lost in forsaking their heritage of the green earth " They meet together, talk, and grow most wise, - But they have lost, in losing solitude, Something—an inward grace, the seeing eyes,
• The power of being alone ;
The power of being alone with earth and skies, Of, going about a task with quietude,
Aware at once of earth's surrounding mood And of an insect crawling on a stone . . ."
Fier removed are the methods and purpose of Mr. Humbert Wolfe. His poem opens with a picture of Mr. Paul Arthur, modein business-man, contemplating the reorganization of religion on a sound commercial basis. Out of these satirical and, rather over-intellectualized afe" lifted, as the poem becomes more spiritually loaded, on to another plane. Perhaps it was the effect of the drug Arthur swallowed to allay the stabbing pains at his heart ; or it may have been the lovely face of the Botticelli_that hung in the room before him ; anyway he dreamed God spoke with him, and then the devil, arguing with him that good and evil were but ciegves of the mine thing, aind both " nothing in the nothingness of GOd." Then, deftly, the poet takes us on to a yet higher plane, and we behold what is virtually Arthur's final apocalypse wherein, after a bitter realization of his life's folly, he lea:qs
that :— s your sins and you have hero become a part of the immortal movement of the Heart, that does not judge, nor blame, nor yet forgive, but being needed by all things that live, needs all of thorn . . . "
Dymer, if not so masterly, is perhaps the better for its simplicity. Here is the evolution towards spiritual freedom of a young man bred in the standardized society of the Perfect City ; but Mr. Hamilton objectifies his theme so effectively and dramatically that it is not until the moving events are all done that we realize the full purport of *what we have been reading. Here is a little epic burnt out of vital experience and given to us through a poet's .eye. Mr. Hamilton's work is new to us ; seldom does a poet first blazon upon the printed page with such a wise and lovely poem. Beside him, Mr. Fletcher seems almost turgid, turbulent. His theme is the biblical myth of man's childhood upon the earth, from the creation of Adam, through the strife of Cain and Abel, to the vision of Noah. " I say there are two sides to God," writes the poet in his preface, " the- light-bearer and the darkness-bearer, Lucifer and Jehovah " ; and his poem treats of the progress of those two forces towards the envisioned harmony of the rainbow. Mr. Fletcher deals in symbols; but he seems to lack the single clear-seeing eye to present them to his readers.
There is nothing abstruse about Mr. Graves. He sings his Irish songs so happily he sets our feet a-tapping. In the Jonger songs—or stories—is a fine humanity and a tender humour.
Though this side of the Atlantic we know Mrs. Conklinis prodigy-daughter better than we know herself, this volume makes us anxious to remedy the omission ; for her lyrics and sonnets combine the fresh-coloured image with the-deep intent that makes true poetry. Her art is so sure we can afford to forget it, and live in the immediate loveliness of the impression she conveys ; indeed, it is so sure that there are times (notably in the section of her book called " The Child in the Mexican Garden ") when she seems to recapture the simple buoyant rapture of a child. Although the first line of one of-Miss Gottschalk's poems runs, " And a poor prayer. in these days, to be simple," it can hardly .be said that she attains simplicity ; yet she forestalls our tendency to be irked with her stiff,-packed, difficult phraseology, by the plea of her first podm :— " For in untravelled soil alone 'can I Unearth the gem or let the mystery lie That never must be found."
And if I confess that most often both gem and mystery' remained for me undiscovered, that is because- I have (and proudly) a simple mind, preferring the fresh beauty of such uncerebralized verses as -these by Mr. Snaitli, on Edward Thomas :— He' went, 'and comes not' home again. Under the guns, that wide and well Crumpled the meadowlands, he fell : A linnet in a hurricane.
"Herein he conquers : there shall be Scarred" upon human memory A shamefast foolishness that slew Some of the precious singing few."
There is no need for Mr. Snaith to pray for simplicity ; his mind does not get in the way-of his heart ;- his craftsmanship is sure because his purpose is single.
C. HENRY WARREN.
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