Modern British Poetry Part 17

"THERE SHALL BE MORE JOY ..."

The little angels of Heaven Each wear a long white dress, And in the tall arcadings Play ball and play at chess;

With never a soil on their garments, Not a sigh the whole day long, Not a bitter note in their pleasure, Not a bitter note in their song.

But they shall know keener pleasure, And they shall know joy more rare-- Keener, keener pleasure When you, my dear, come there.

The little angels of Heaven Each wear a long white gown, And they lean over the ramparts Waiting and looking down.

_Walter De la Mare_

The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contemporary poetry, Walter De la Mare, was born in 1873. Although he did not begin to bring out his work in book form until he was over 30, he is, as Harold Williams has written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child." De la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he uses thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves a grace that is remarkable in its universality. "In a few words, seemingly artless and unsought" (to quote Williams again), "he can express a pathos or a hope as wide as man's life."

De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in _Peac.o.c.k Pie_ (1913) he surprises us again and again by transforming what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly thrilling s.n.a.t.c.h of music. A score of times he takes things as casual as the feeding of chickens or the swallowing of physic, berry-picking, eating, hair-cutting--and turns them into magic. These poems read like lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. The trick of revealing the ordinary in whimsical colors, of catching the commonplace off its guard, is the first of De la Mare's two magics.

This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our consciousness.

_The Listeners_ (1912) is a book that, like all the best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and mystery seem soaked in the lines, and a cool wind from Nowhere blows over them.

That most magical of modern verses, "The Listeners," and the brief music of "An Epitaph" are two fine examples among many. In the first of these poems there is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, the thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the narrative itself--the less than half-told adventure of some new Childe Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe. Never have silence and black night been reproduced more creepily, nor has the symbolism of man's courage facing the cryptic riddle of life been more memorably expressed.

De la Mare's chief distinction, however, lies not so much in what he says as in how he says it; he can even take outworn words like "thridding," "athwart," "amaranthine" and make them live again in a poetry that is of no time and of all time. He writes, it has been said, as much for antiquity as for posterity; he is a poet who is distinctively in the world and yet not wholly of it.

THE LISTENERS

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the gra.s.ses Of the forest's ferny floor.

And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller's head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; 'Is there anybody there?' he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:-- 'Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,' he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

AN EPITAPH

Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she; I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country.

But beauty vanishes; beauty pa.s.ses; However rare--rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

TIRED TIM

Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.

He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do; He moons and mopes the livelong day, Nothing to think about, nothing to say; Up to bed with his candle to creep, Too tired to yawn; too tired to sleep: Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.

OLD SUSAN

When Susan's work was done, she'd sit With one fat guttering candle lit, And window opened wide to win The sweet night air to enter in; There, with a thumb to keep her place She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face.

Her mild eyes gliding very slow Across the letters to and fro, While wagged the guttering candle flame In the wind that through the window came.

And sometimes in the silence she Would mumble a sentence audibly, Or shake her head as if to say, 'You silly souls, to act this way!'

And never a sound from night I'd hear, Unless some far-off c.o.c.k crowed clear; Or her old shuffling thumb should turn Another page; and rapt and stern, Through her great gla.s.ses bent on me She'd glance into reality; And shake her round old silvery head, With--'You!--I thought you was in bed!'-- Only to tilt her book again, And rooted in Romance remain.

NOD

Softly along the road of evening, In a twilight dim with rose, Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew Old Nod, the shepherd, goes.

His drowsy flock streams on before him, Their fleeces charged with gold, To where the sun's last beam leans low On Nod the shepherd's fold.

The hedge is quick and green with briar, From their sand the conies creep; And all the birds that fly in heaven Flock singing home to sleep.

His lambs outnumber a noon's roses, Yet, when night's shadows fall, His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon, Misses not one of all.

His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, The waters of no-more-pain; His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, "Rest, rest, and rest again."

_G. K. Chesterton_

This brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and lyricist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, Kensington, in 1874, and began his literary life by reviewing books on art for various magazines. He is best known as a writer of flashing, paradoxical essays on anything and everything, like _Tremendous Trifles_ (1909), _Varied Types_ (1905), and _All Things Considered_ (1910). But he is also a stimulating critic; a keen appraiser, as in his volume _Heretics_ (1905) and his a.n.a.lytical studies of Robert Browning, Charles d.i.c.kens, and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of strange and grotesque romances like _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ (1906), _The Man Who Was Thursday_ (1908), which Chesterton himself has subt.i.tled "A Nightmare," and _The Flying Inn_ (1914); the author of several books of fantastic short stories, ranging from the wildly whimsical narratives in _The Club of Queer Trades_ (1905) to that amazing sequence _The Innocence of Father Brown_ (1911)--which is a series of religious detective stories!

Besides being the creator of all of these, Chesterton finds time to be a prolific if sometimes too acrobatic newspaperman, a lay preacher in disguise (witness _Orthodoxy_ [1908], _What's Wrong with the World?_ [1910], _The Ball and the Cross_ [1909]), a pamphleteer, and a poet.

His first volume of verse, _The Wild Knight and Other Poems_ (1900), a collection of quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by _The Ballad of the White Horse_ (1911), one long poem which, in spite of Chesterton's ever-present didactic sermonizing, is possibly the most stirring creation he has achieved. This poem has the swing, the vigor, the spontaneity, and, above all, the ageless simplicity of the true narrative ballad.

Scarcely less notable is the ringing "Lepanto" from his later _Poems_ (1915) which, antic.i.p.ating the banging, clanging verses of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," is one of the finest of modern chants. It is interesting to see how the syllables beat, as though on bra.s.s; it is thrilling to feel how, in one's pulses, the armies sing, the feet tramp, the drums snarl, and all the tides of marching crusaders roll out of lines like:

"Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war; Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold; Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes...."

Chesterton, the prose-paradoxer, is a delightful product of a skeptical age. But it is Chesterton the poet who is more likely to outlive it.

LEPANTO[14]

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard; It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.

They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.

The cold queen of England is looking in the gla.s.s; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Ma.s.s; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young.

In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.