Studies of Contemporary Poets Part 12

He might have chosen always to sing about G.o.ds and heroes and fair ladies with "white hands, foam-frail." But, just as clearly, you will see that he has been aroused from dreams. Vanishing remnants of them are perceptible in such a piece as "The Twilight People"; and when they are gone, in that serene moment before complete awakening, when the light is growing and the birds call and a fresh air blows, you get a piece like "Praise":

Dear, they are praising your beauty, The gra.s.s and the sky: The sky in a silence of wonder, The gra.s.s in a sigh.

I too would sing for your praising, Dearest, had I Speech as the whispering gra.s.s, Or the silent sky.

These have an art for the praising Beauty so high.

Sweet, you are praised in a silence, Sung in a sigh.

Then comes the awakening, sudden and sharp, with an impulse to spring out and away from those old dreams of myth and romance:

Bundle the G.o.ds away: Richer than Danaan gold, The whisper of leaves in the rain, The secrets the wet hills hold.

A spiritual adventure seems to be implied in the poem from which this fragment is taken, similar to that which Mr Cousins has recorded in "Straight and Crooked." It is the call of reality: the impulse which is drawing the poetic spirit closer and closer to life, and bidding it seek inspiration in common human experience. Thus when we find Mr O'Sullivan invoking the vision of earth we soon discover that 'earth' means something more to him than 'countryside'--the beauty of Nature and of pastoral existence. It comprises also towns and crowded streets and busy people; and it seems to mean ultimately any aspect of human existence which has the power to induce poetic ecstasy. An infinitely wider range is thus open to the poet, and though this little volume does not pretend to cover any large part of it, there are pieces which suggest its almost boundless possibility. Let us put two of them together. The first, "A Piper," describes a little street scene:

A Piper in the streets to-day Set up, and tuned, and started to play, And away, away, away on the tide Of his music we started; on every side Doors and windows were opened wide, And men left down their work and came, And women with petticoats coloured like flame And little bare feet that were blue with cold, Went dancing back to the age of gold, And all the world went gay, went gay, For half an hour in the street to-day.

That expresses the rapture which is evoked directly by the touch of the actual. The next piece, a fragment from "A Madonna," is equally characteristic; but its inspiration came through another art, a picture by Beatrice Elvery:

Draw nigh, O foolish worshippers who mock With pious woe of sainted imagery The kingly-human presence of your G.o.d.

Draw near, and with new reverence gaze on her.

See you, these hands have toiled, these feet have trod In all a woman's business; bend the knee.

For this of very certainty is she Ordained of heavenly hierarchies to rock The cradle of the infant carpenter.

Under the diverse sources from which such poems immediately spring, there flows the current which is fertilizing, in greater or less degree, all modern poetry. It has been running strongly in England for some years, but hitherto the Irish poet has hardly seemed conscious of it, though it was visibly moving him. Its presence has been mainly felt in the silence of Mr Yeats, whose lovely romanticism fell dumb at its touch. But, significantly, the latest poetic utterance of Ireland is a cry of complete realization. It has remained for Mr Cousins, more sensitive and complex than his compatriots, to hear the call of his age more consciously than they; and it is left to him, in grace and courage, to declare it:

... From a sleep I emerge. I am clothed again with this woven vesture of laws; But I am not, and never again shall be the man that I was.

At the zenith of life I am born again, I begin.

Know ye, I am awake, outside and within.

I have heard, I have seen, I have known; I feel the bite of this shackle of place and name, And nothing can be the same.

I have sent three shouts of freedom along the wind.

I have struck one hand of kinship in the hands of G.o.ds, and one in the hands of women and men.

I am awake. I shall never sleep again.

_Rose Macaulay_

There is one small volume of poems by Miss Macaulay, called _The Two Blind Countries_. It is curiously interesting, since it may be regarded as the testament of mysticism for the year of its appearance, nineteen hundred and fourteen. That is, indeed, the most important fact about it; though no one need begin to fear that he is to be fobbed off with inferior poetry on that account. For the truth is that the artistic value of this work is almost, if not quite, equal to the exceptional power of abstraction that it evinces. Poetry has really been achieved here, extremely individual in manner and in matter, and of a high order of beauty.

One is compelled, however, though one may a little regret the compulsion, to start from the fact of the poet's mystical tendency. Not that she would mind, presumably; the t.i.tle of her book is an avowal, clear enough at a second glance, of its point of view. But the reader has an instinct, in which the mere interpreter but follows him, to accept a poem first as art rather than thought; and if he examine it at all, to begin with what may be called its concrete beauty. I will not say that the order is reversed in the case of Miss Macaulay's poetry, since that would be to accuse her of an artistic crime of which she is emphatically not guilty. But it is significant that the greater number of pieces in this book impress the mind with the idea they convey, simultaneously with the sounds in which it is expressed. And as the idea is generally adventurous, and sometimes fantastic, it is that which arrests the reader and on which he lingers, at any rate long enough to discover its originality.

But though the mystical element of the work is suggested in its very t.i.tle, one discovers almost as early that it is mysticism of a new kind.

It belongs inalienably to this poet and is unmistakably of this age. The world of matter, this jolly place of light and air and colour and human faces, is vividly apprehended; but it is seen by the poet to be ringed round by another realm which, though unsubstantial, is no less real.

Indeed, so strong is her consciousness of that other realm, and its presence so insistently felt, that sometimes she is not sure to which of the two she really belongs. In the first poem of the book, using the fictive 'he' as its subject, she indicates her att.i.tude to that region beyond sense. In the physical world, this 'blind land' of 'shadows and droll shapes,' the soul is an alien wanderer. Constantly it hears a 'clamorous whisper' from the other side of the door of sense, coming from the

... m.u.f.fled speech Of a world of folk.

But no cry can reach those others: no clear sight can be had of them, and no intelligible word of theirs can come back.

Only through a crack in the door's blind face He would reach a thieving hand, To draw some clue to his own strange place From the other land.

But his closed hand came back emptily, As a dream drops from him who wakes; And naught might he know but how a m.u.f.fled sea In whispers breaks.

On either side of a gray barrier The two blind countries lie; But he knew not which held him prisoner, Nor yet know I.

This poem may be said to state the theme of the whole book. It would appear, however, that in the difficult feat of giving form to thought so intangible, the poet has attained here a detachment which is almost cold. But it would be unfair to judge her manner of expression from one poem; and it happens that there is another piece, built upon a similar theme, which is much more characteristic. It is called "Foregrounds,"

and here again the two countries are conceived as bordering upon each other, inter-penetrating, but sharply contrasted as night from day. The contrast favours a more vivid setting, and the subjective treatment, admitting deeper emotion, infuses a warmth that "The Alien" lacked.

Moreover, the psychic region is here called simply the _dream-country_; and, presented in the delicate suggestion of a moonlit night, it hints only at the lure of the mystery, and nothing of its terror. Throughout the poem, too, runs exuberant joy in common earthly things, in the beauty of nature and in human feeling; and this is followed, in the closing lines of each stanza, by an afterthought and a touch of melancholy: reflection coming, in the most natural way, close upon the heels of emotion. Thus the first lines revel in the glory of spring; and then, almost audibly, the tone drops to the lower level of one who perceives that glory as the veil of something beyond it.

The pleasant ditch is a milky way, So alight with stars it is, And over it breaks, like pale sea-spray, The laughing cataract of the may In luminous harmonies.

(Cloak with a flower-wrought veil The face of the dream-country.

The fields of the moon are kind, are pale, And quiet is she.)

Thus, too, in the third stanza, the recurrent idea of an alien spirit is caught into imagery which glows with light and colour: imagery so simple and sensuous as almost to mock abstraction and quite to disguise it; but bearing at its heart the essence of a philosophy. Again the soul is imagined as standing at the barrier of the two countries, when reality has melted to an apparition and the sense of that other realm has grown acute. Bereft of the comfortable earth, but powerless still to enter the dream-country: standing lonely and fearful at the cold verge of the mystic region, the spirit will seek to draw about it the garment of appearance:

I will weave, of the clear clean shapes of things, A curtain to shelter me; I will paint it with kingcups and sunrisings, And glints of blue for the swallow's wings, And green for the apple-tree.

(Oh, a whisper has pierced the veil Out of the dream-country, As a wind moans in the straining sail Of a ship lost at sea.)

In reading this poem, and in others too, one is struck by the hold which the real world has upon our poet. It is a surprising fact in one of so speculative a turn, and is the clearest sign by which we recognize her work as of our time and no other. Her thought may be projected very far, but her feet are generally upon solid ground. Perhaps I ought rather to say that they are always there; for it is more than probable that bed-rock may exist in two or three poems where I have been unable to get down to it. It is in any case safe to say that a sense of reality--shown in human sympathy and tenderness for lowly creatures, in love of nature and perception of beauty, in truth to fact, in a touch of shrewd insight and a sense of humour bred of the habit of detachment--is very strong. I do not suggest that these qualities are everywhere apparent. By their nature they are such as could not often enter into the framework of poems so subtly wrought. But they are woven into the texture of the poet's mentality, and have even directed its method. So that, remote as may be the idea upon which she is working, it is generally brought within the range of sight; and, intangible though it may seem, it is given definite and charming shape. And if there were not one obvious proof of this steady anchorage, we might have happy a.s.surance of it in the clarity and precision of her thought. But fortunately there _is_ obvious proof. There is, for instance, this delicious pa.s.sage in the poem from which I have just quoted, surely proving a kinship with our own 'blind country' as close as with that other and something dearer:

The jolly donkeys that love me well Nuzzle with thistly lips; The harebell is song made visible, The dandelion's lamp a miracle, When the day's lamp dips and dips.

There are, too, a sonnet called "Cards" and the very beautiful longer poem, "Summons," in which the glow of human love makes of the supernatural a mere shadow. In "Cards" the scene is a 'dim lily-illumined garden,' and four people are playing there by candle light. But out of the darkness which rings the circle of flickering light sinister things creep, menacing the frail life of one of the players.

But, like swords clashing, my love on their hate Struck sharp, and drove, and pushed.... Grimly round you Fought we that fight, they pressing pa.s.sionate Into the lit circle which called and drew Shadows and moths of night.... I held the gate.

You said, "Our game," more truly than you knew.

Again we perceive this sense of reality in the humour of a poem like "St Mark's Day" or "Three." It is a quality hearty and cheery in the way of one who knows all the facts, but has reckoned with them and can afford to laugh. It has a depth of tone unexpected in an artist whose natural impulse seems to be towards delicate line and neutral tint; and there is a tang of salt in it which one suspects of having been added of intent--as a quite superfluous preservative against sentimentality. "St Mark's Day" is very illuminating in this respect, and in the bracing sanity under which mere superst.i.tion wilts. The village girl, teased by neighbours into believing that her spectre was seen the night before and that therefore she must die within the year, is a genuine bit of rustic humanity. No portrait of her is given; but in two or three strong touches she stands before us, plump, rosy and rather stupid; hale enough to live her fourscore years, but sobbing in foolish fright as her st.u.r.dy arms peg the wet linen upon the line.

I laughed at her over the sticky larch fence, And said, "Who's down-hearted, Dolly?"

And Dolly sobbed at me, "They saw you, too!"

(And so the liars said they had, Though I've not wasted paper nor rhymes telling you), And, "Well," said I, "_I'm_ not sad."

"But since you and me must die within the year, What if we went together To make cowslip b.a.l.l.s in the fields, and hear The blackbirds whistling to the weather?"

So in the water-fields till blue mists rose We loitered, Dolly and I, And pulled wet kingcups where the cold brook goes, And when we've done living, we'll die.

The realism of that goes deeper than its technique, and is a notable weapon in the hands of such an idealist. But in "Three," another humorous poem, something even more surprising has been accomplished. "St Mark's Day" is a bit of pure comedy, and might have been written by a poet for whom _one_ 'blind country' was the beginning and end of all experience. That is to say, it is interesting as proof of a healthy grasp on the real world; but the distinctive feature of this poetry hardly appears in it. Abstraction is absent, inevitably, of course; and with it that ideal realm which largely preoccupies the poet's thought.

But in "Three," with reality no less strong, with art matching it in bold and vigorous strokes, and touches here and there positively comic; with the scene laid out-of-doors in a sunny noonday of August, there is achieved an almost startling sense of the supernatural. More than that, it is the supernatural under two different aspects, or on two separate planes (whichever may be the correct way to state that sort of thing): the consciousness of a ghostly presence, in the accepted sense of the spirit of one dead; and that obscure but disturbing awareness of a hidden life close at hand which most people have experienced at some time or other. But while the poet has sketched these two of her "Three"

with an equally light hand, smiling amusedly, as it were, at her own fantasy, she has differentiated them quite clearly. For the true ghost, conjured out of the stuff of memory, a.s.sociation and the influence of locality, is a creature of pure imagination. He is not so much described as suggested, and only dimly felt. There is a stanza devoted to the Cambridge landscape in the hot noon, and then--

In the long gra.s.s and tall nettles I lay abed, With hawthorn and bryony Tangled o'erhead.