Provocations Part 1

Provocations.

by Sibyl Bristowe.

INTRODUCTION

The verses in this volume cover very many and various occasions; and are therefore the very contrary of what is commonly called occasional verse.

The term is used with a meaning that is very mutable; or with a meaning that has been greatly distorted and degraded. Occasion should mean opportunity; and in the case of poetry it should rather mean provocation. And the trick of writing upon what are called public occasions, instead of upon what may truly be described as private provocations, has been responsible for much verse which is not only insufficient but insincere. It has produced not only many bad poems; but what is perhaps worse, many bad poems from many good poets. The sincerity of Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poetry is perhaps most clearly proved by the number of points at which it touches life; and the spontaneity, or even suddenness, with which they are touched. It is an occasional verse which arises out of real occasions, and not out of merely fict.i.tious or even merely formal ones. Thus while the one or two poems on the great war are probably the best, they are by no means the biggest; they are not the most arresting in the sense of being the most ambitious. They are arresting because the great war really is great, and moves an imaginative spirit to great issues; it is public but it is very far from being official. The war, indeed, is necessarily more important as a private event even than as a public event. And the few but fine lines, on a brother fallen in a fight amid wild river that sundered man from man, is a model of the manner in which such mighty events take their place among the impressions of the more sincere and spontaneous type of talent. The topic takes its pre-eminence by intensity and not by s.p.a.ce, or even in a sense by design. Indeed it is best expressed in a metaphor used by the writer herself about the topic itself; the metaphor of the colour red in its relation to other colours. Red rivets the eye, not by quant.i.ty but by quality; and in any picture or pattern a spot or streak of it will make itself the feature or the key. Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poem conceives the Creator confronted as with a broken spectrum or a gap in coloured gla.s.s; feeling the whole range of vision to be dim and impoverished and adding, by the authority of His own mysterious art, the dreadful colour of martyrdom.

Indeed the point of the comparison might very well be conveyed by the two poems about a London garden; that on the garden in peace being comparatively long, and that about the garden in war exceedingly short; short but sharply pathetic with its notion of peering and probing for the microscope flowers that must be a part of the most utilitarian vegetables. Indeed the short poems are certainly the most successful; and there is the same brevity in the last line of the poem about the tragic pa.s.sage of time; "If lips of children had not told me so." The same general impression, as in the comparison already noted, is conveyed, for instance, in the fact that the poems about South Africa are private rather than public poems; are in that sense, if the phrase be properly comprehended, rather colonial than imperial. That is, they are individual glimpses of great torrid wastes, like similar individual glimpses of quiet northern woods; visions of crude and golden cities as personal as the parallel visions of normal northern cottages. Miss Sibyl Bristowe is perhaps an amateur, in the sense in which this is generally true of one who happens to be an artist in another art; but it is unfortunate that the world has so much missed the notion of that natural ardour that should belong to the word.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The author has to acknowledge the courtesy of the Editors of "The Poetry Review" and "The Johannesburg Star" for permission to include poems that have appeared in their pages.

The Great War

Into His colour store G.o.d dipped His hand And drew it forth Full of strange hues forgotten, contraband Of War and Wrath.

Time wove the pattern of the years, that so The quick and dead Might knit their bleeding crosses in. And lo!

A patch of red!

My London Garden, 1914

My Garden is a tiny square Of bordered green And gravel brown In misty town, And chimneys smoky and unclean Sweep to the sky.--_You_ would not care To visit there.

The Gra.s.s creeps up all in between the stones And raises undisturbed its luscious green And laughs for youth in shrill and ringing tones.

I love it that it grows up so serene, Dauntless and bright And laughing me to scorn, So vivid and so slight, Glad for the night-shed dew and smoke-bred morn.

My little patch of bordered green and brown Sleeps in the bosom of a grim old town, I wish that you could see Its beauty here with me; I'd tell you many things you never knew, For few, so few Know the romance of such a London strip, With ferny screen That slants shy gleams of sunlight in between And weeds which flourish just inside the dip, Holding their tenure with a firm deep grip Where prouder things all die.

Small wonder I Tend my tall weed as tho' it were a gem, Note every leaf, and watch the stalwart stem Wax strong and high-- My weed plot lives in reckless luxury.

But, in the Spring, before black grime Has done its worst, And cruel Time And dust accursed Have marred the innocence of each young leaf, Or soiled the blossoms, like a wanton thief-- Ma.s.ses of tulips, pink and white, Rise from the earth in prim delight, And iris, king of pomp and state, In vesture fine And purple and pale gold Its buds unfold-- A mighty potentate, And marshals n.o.bly, proudly into line, Whilst lilacs sway in wind and rushing breeze, Bowing and nodding to some poplar trees.

But stay!-- _You_ would not care To visit there Midst such surroundings grey.

My Garden's but an oasis of hope Set in the frown And dismal grandeur of a grim old town, A semblance merely of the lawns _you_ see; A hint, an echo of the things that be!

But he or she would be a misanthrope Who would not share my garden hope with me.

My Garden, 1918

Such was my garden once, a Springtide hope of flowers, All rosy pink or violet or blue Or yellow gold, with sunflecks on the dew.

Now in their place a Summer garden towers Of green-leaved artichokes and turnip tops, Of peas and parsnips, sundry useful crops.

--But even vegetables must have _little_ flowers.

Over the Top!

_Ten_ more minutes! Say yer prayers, Read yer Bibles,--pa.s.s the rum!

_Ten_ more minutes! Strike me dumb, 'Ow they creeps on unawares Those blooming minutes. _Nine_. It's queer, I'm sorter stunned. It ain't with fear!

_Eight._ It's like as if a frog Waddled round in your inside Cold as ice-blocks, straddled wide, Tired o' waiting.--Where's the grog?

_Seven._ I'll play you pitch and toss.

_Six._ I wins, and tails your loss.

'Nother minute sprinted by 'Fore I knowed it; only _four_ (Break 'em into seconds) more 'Twixt us and Eternity!

Every word I've ever said Seems a-shouting in my head!

_Three_. Larst night a little star Fairly shook up in the sky, Frightened by the lullaby Rattled by the dogs of war.

Funny thing--that star all white Saw old Blighty too, larst night!

_Two._ I ain't ashamed o' prayers, They're only wishes sent ter G.o.d, Bits o' plants from b.l.o.o.d.y sod Trailing up His golden stairs.

_Ninety seconds._ Well, who cares!-- _One._ . . . . . .

No pipe, no blare, no drum-- Over the Top!--to Kingdom Come

To His Dear Memory

(April 14th, 1917)

Beneath the humid skies Where green birds wing, and heavy burgeoned trees Sway in the fevered breeze, My Brother lies.

And rivers pa.s.sionate[A]

Tore through the mountain pa.s.ses, swept the plains, O'erbrimmed with tears, o'erbrimmed with summer rains, All wild, all desolate.

Whilst the deep Mother-breast Of drowsy-lidded Nature, drunk with dreams, Below Pangani, by Rufigi streams, Took him to rest.

Beneath the sunlit skies, Where bright birds wing, and rich luxuriant trees Sway in the fevered breeze, My Brother lies.