Studies of Contemporary Poets Part 20

This humane temper is the more remarkable from being braced by a shrewd faculty of insight. There is no sentimentality in it; and that the poet has no illusions about human frailty may be seen in such a poem as "Said The Old-Old Man." It is ballasted with humour, too; and has a charming whimsicality. Hence the lightness of touch in "Windy Corner"--

O, I can tell and I can know What the wind rehea.r.s.es: "A poet loved a lady so, Loved her well, and let her go While he wrote his verses."

That's the tale the winds relate Soon as night is shady.

If it's true, I'll simply state A poet is a fool to rate His art above his lady.

Returning, however, to the larger implications of this poetry, one may find a pa.s.sion for liberty in it, and a courageous faith in the future of the race. Here we have, in fact, a pure idealist, one of the invincible few who have brought their ideals into touch with reality.

One does not suspect it at first--or at least we do not see how far it goes--largely for the reason that it is so deeply grounded. The poet's hold on life, on the actual, on the very data of experience, is unyielding: his perception of truth is keen and his intellectual honesty complete. And then the way in which his imagination moulds things in the round, as it were, leaves no room to guess that there is a limitless something behind or within. True, we have felt all along what we can only call the spiritual touch in this poetry. It is always there, lighter or more commanding, and sometimes it will come home very sweetly in a comic piece, as for instance when "The Merry Policeman," appointed guardian of the Tree, calls rea.s.suringly to the scared thief:

... "Be at rest, The best to him who wants the best."

We have observed, too, a faculty of seeing the spirit of things--a habit of looking right through facts to something beyond them. But still we did not quite understand what these signs meant; and if we tried to account for them in any way, we probably offered ourselves the all-too-easy explanation that this was the playful, fanciful, Celtic way of looking at the world. Well, so it may be; but that charming manner is, in all gravity, just the outward sign of an inward grace. And if anyone should doubt that it points in this case to a clear idealism, he may be invited to consider this little poem which prefaces the poet's second volume, called "The Hill of Vision":

Everything that I can spy Through the circle of my eye, Everything that I can see Has been woven out of me; I have sown the stars, and threw Clouds of morning and of eve Up into the vacant blue; Everything that I perceive, Sun and sea and mountain high, All are moulded by my eye: Closing it, what shall I find?

--Darkness, and a little wind.

Now it must not be inferred that Mr Stephens is an austere person who propounds ideals to himself as themes for his poetry. We should detect his secret much more readily if he did--and it may be that we should not like him quite so well. Hardly ever do you catch him, as it were, saying to his Muse: "Come, let us make a song about liberty, or the future."

The very process of his thought, as well as the order of his verse, seems often to be by way of an object to an idea. He takes some bit of the actual world--a bird, a tree, or a human creature; and tuning his instrument to that, he is presently off and away into the blue.

Once, however, he did sing directly on this subject of liberty, and about the external, physical side of it. It was, of course, in that early book; and there may also be found two studies of the idea of liberty in its more abstract nature. They both treat of the woman giving up her life into the hands of the man whom she marries. And in both there is brought out with ringing clarity the inalienable freedom of the human soul. Thus "The Red-haired Man's Wife," musing upon the inexplicable changes that marriage has wrought for her--on her dependence, and on the apparent loss of her very ident.i.ty, wins through to the light--

I am separate still, I am I and not you: And my mind and my will, As in secret they grew, Still are secret, unreached and untouched and not subject to you.

Thus, too, "The Rebel" finds an answer to an importunate lover--

You sob you love me--What, Must I desert my soul Because you wish to kiss my lips,

I must be I, not you, That says the thing in brief.

I grew to this without your aid, Can face the future unafraid, Nor pine away with grief Because I'm lonely....

It is, however, in "A Prelude and a Song" that this ardour of freedom finds purest expression. Not that the poem was designed to that end. I believe that it was made for nothing on this earth but the sheer joy of singing. How can one describe this poem? It is the lyrical soul of poetry; it is the heart of poetic rapture; it is the musical spirit of the wind and of birds' cries; it is a pa.s.sion of movement, swaying to the dancing grace of leaves and flowers and gra.s.s, to the majesty of sailing clouds; it is the sweet, shrill, palpitating ecstasy of the lark, singing up and up until he is out of sight, sustaining his song at the very door of heaven, and singing into sight again, to drop suddenly down to the green earth, exhausted.--And I have not yet begun to say what the poem really is: I have a doubt whether prose is equal to a definition. In some degree at any rate it is a paean of freedom: delighted liberty lives in it. But we cannot apply our little distinctions here, saying that it is this or that or the other kind of freedom which is extolled; because we are now in a region where thought and feeling are one; in a golden age where good and evil are lost in innocency; in a blessed state where body and soul have forgotten their old feud in glad reunion.

One hesitates to quote from the poem. It is long, and as the t.i.tle implies, it is in two movements. But though every stanza has a lightsome grace which makes it lovely in itself--though the whole chain, if broken up, would yield as many gems as there are stanzas, irregular in size and shape indeed, but each shining and complete--the great beauty of the poem is its beauty as a whole. It would seem a reproach to imperil that.

Yet there is a culminating pa.s.sage of extreme significance to which we must come directly for the crowning word of the poet's philosophy. From that we may take a fragment now, if only to observe the reach of its imagination and to win some sense which the poem conveys of limitless spiritual range.

Reach up my wings!

Now broaden into s.p.a.ce and carry me Beyond where any lark that sings Can get: Into the utmost sharp tenuity, The breathing-point, the start, the scarcely-stirred High slenderness where never any bird Has winged to yet!

The moon peace and the star peace and the peace Of chilly sunlight: to the void of s.p.a.ce, The emptiness, the giant curve, the great Wide-stretching arms wherein the G.o.ds embrace And stars are born and suns....

There follows hard upon that what is in effect a confession of faith. It is not explicitly so, of course. Subjective this poet may be--is it not a virtue in the lyricist?--but he does not confide his religion to us in so many words. He has an artistic conscience. But the avowal, though it is by way of allegory and grows up out of the imagery of the poem as naturally as a blossom from its stem, is clear enough. And is supported elsewhere, implicitly, or by a mental att.i.tude, or outlined now and then in figurative brilliance. There can be no reason to doubt its strength and its sincerity--and there is every reason to rejoice in it--for it reveals Mr Stephens as a poet of the future.

One pauses there, realizing that the term may mean very much--or nothing at all. It may even suggest a certain technical vogue which, however admirable in the theory of its originators, apparently is not yet justified in the creation of manifest beauty. Our poet has no a.s.sociation with that, of course, except in that he shares the general impulse of the poetic spirit of his generation. That is, quite clearly, to escape from the tyranny of the past in thought and word and metrical form; and therein he is at one with most of the poets in this book. We may grant that it is an important exception: that the movement which is indicated here may be the sober British version of its more daring Italian counterpart. Yet there remains still a difference wide enough and deep enough to disclaim any technical relationship.

The root of the matter lies there, however. In Mr Stephens what we may call the poetic instinct of the age works not merely to escape from the past, but to advance into the future--and it has become a conscious, reasoned hope in human destiny. It does not with him so much influence the form of the work as it directs the spirit of it. And that spirit is an absolute and impa.s.sioned belief in the future of mankind. Therein he stands contrasted with many of the younger English poets, and with his own compatriots. With many of his compeers the escape has been into their own time, and the n.o.blest thing evolved from that is a grave and tender social conscience. Some, of course, have not escaped at all, and have no wish to do so. Their work has its own soft evening loveliness.

But whilst Mr Yeats lives delicately in a romantic past, whilst poor Synge lived tragically in a sardonic present, this poet stands on his hill of vision and cries to the world the good tidings of a promised land. Here it is, from the closing pa.s.sage of "A Prelude and a Song":

There the flower springs, Therein does grow The bud of hope, the miracle to come For whose dear advent we are striving dumb And joyless: Garden of Delight That G.o.d has sowed!

In thee the flower of flowers, The apple of our tree, The banner of our towers, The recompense for every misery, The angel-man, the purity, the light Whom we are working to has his abode; Until our back and forth, our life and death And life again, our going and return Prepare the way: until our latest breath, Deep-drawn and agonized, for him shall burn A path: for him prepare Laughter and love and singing everywhere; A morning and a sunrise and a day!

_Margaret L. Woods_

About one half of the poetry in Mrs Woods' collected edition is dramatic in character. There are two plays in regular form, tragedies both. One, _Wild Justice,_ is in six scenes which carry the action rapidly forward almost without a break. The other, called _The Princess of Hanover_, is in three acts, which move with a wider sweep through the rise, culmination, and crisis of a tragic story. These two dramas, which are powerfully imagined and skilfully wrought, are placed in a separate section at the end of the book--quite the best wine thus being left to finish the feast.

Fine as they are, however, the plays do not completely represent the poet's dramatic gift. And when we note the comic elements of two or three pieces which are tucked away in the middle of the volume, we may admit a hope that Mrs Wood may be impelled on some fair day to attempt regular comedy. There is, for instance, the fun of the delightful medley called "Marlborough Fair." Here are broad humour and vigorous, hearty life which smells of the soil; little studies of country-folk, incomplete but vivid; sc.r.a.ps of racy dialogue, and the prattle of a child, all interwoven with the grotesquer fancies of a fertile imagination, endowing even the beasts and inanimate objects of the show with consciousness and speech. Hints there are in plenty (though to be sure they are in some cases no more than hints) that the poet's dramatic sense would handle the common stuff of life as surely and as freely as it deals with tragedy. In this particular poem, of course, the touches are of the nature of low comedy; the awkward sweethearting of a pair of rustic lovers; the showman, alternating between bl.u.s.ter and enticement; the rough banter of a group of farm lads about the c.o.kernut-shy, and the matron who presides there--

Swarthy and handsome and broad of face 'Twixt the banded brown of her glossy hair.

In her ears are shining silver rings, Her head and ma.s.sive throat are bare, She needs good length in her ap.r.o.n strings And has a jolly voice and loud To cry her wares and draw the crowd.

--Fine c.o.ker-nuts! My lads, we're giving Clean away! Who wants to win 'em?

Fresh c.o.ker-nuts! The milk's yet in 'em.

Come boys! Only a penny a shot, Three nuts if you hit and the fun if not.

The effects are broad and strong, the tone cheery. But in another piece where the dramatic element enters, "The May Morning and the Old Man,"

the note is deeper. There is, indeed, in the talk of the two old men on the downland road, a much graver tone of the Comic Spirit. One of them has come slowly up the hill and greets another who is working in a field by the roadside with a question. He wants to know how far it is to Chillingbourne; he is going back to his old home there and must reach it before nightfall.

FIRST OLD MAN. It bean't for j'y I taak the road.

But, Mester, I be getten awld.

Do seem as though in all the e'th There bean't no plaace, No room on e'th for awld volk.

SECOND OLD MAN. The e'th do lie Yonder, so wide as Heaven a'most, And G.o.d as made un Made room, I warr'nt, for all Christian souls.

It is, however, through the medium of tragedy that the genius of Mrs Woods has found most powerful expression. Not her charming lyrics, not even the contemplative beauty of her elegiac poems, can stand beside the creative energy of the two plays to which we must come directly. But the best of the lyrics are notable, nevertheless; and two or three have already pa.s.sed into the common store of great English poetry. Of such is the splendid hymn, "To the Forgotten Dead," with its exulting pride of race chastened by the thought of death.

To the forgotten dead, Come, let us drink in silence ere we part.

To every fervent yet resolved heart That brought its tameless pa.s.sion and its tears, Renunciation and laborious years, To lay the deep foundations of our race, To rear its mighty ramparts overhead And light its pinnacles with golden grace.

To the unhonoured dead.

To the forgotten dead, Whose dauntless hands were stretched to grasp the rein Of Fate and hurl into the void again Her thunder-hoofed horses, rushing blind Earthward along the courses of the wind.

Among the stars along the wind in vain Their souls were scattered and their blood was shed, And nothing, nothing of them doth remain.

To the thrice-perished dead.

It will be seen that the lyric gift of the poet moves at the prompting of an imaginative pa.s.sion. It is nearly always so in this poetry. Very seldom does the impulse appear to come from intimate personal emotion or individual experience; and the volume may therefore help to refute the dogma that the poetry of a woman is bound to be subjective, from the laws of her own nature. Occasionally, of course, a direct cry will seem to make itself heard--the most reticent human creature will pay so much toll to its humanity. And it is true that in such a spontaneous utterance the voice will be distinctively feminine--life as the woman knows it will find its interpreter. Thus we see austerity breaking down in the poem "On the Death of an Infant," mournfully sweet with a mother's sorrow. Hence, too, in "Under the Lamp" comes the loathing for "the vile hidden commerce of the city"; and equally there comes a touch of that feminine bias (yielding in these late days perhaps to fuller knowledge and consequent sympathy) which inclines to regard the evil from the point of view of the degradation of the man rather than that of the hideous wrong to the woman. Or again, there is "The Changeling,"

perhaps the tenderest of the few poems which may perhaps, in some sense, be called subjective. Through the thin veil of allegory one catches a glimpse of the enduring mystery of maternal love. The mother is brooding over the change in her child: she has not been watchful enough, she thinks; and while she was unheeding, some evil thing had entered into her baby and driven out the fair soul with which he began.

Perhaps he called me and I was dumb.

Unconcerned I sat and heard Little things, Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings, A frightened bird-- Or faint hands at the window-pane?

And now he will never come again, The little soul. He is quite lost.

She tries to woo him back, with prayer and incantations; but he will not come; and when at last she is worn out with waiting, she seeks an old wizard and begs him to give her forgetfulness. But it is a hard thing that she is asking: it needs a mighty spell to make a woman forget her son; and the mother has to go without the boon. She has not wealth enough in the world to pay the Wise Man's fee. But afterwards she is glad that she was too poor to pay the price:

Because if I did not remember him, My little child--Ah! what should we have, He and I? Not even a grave With a name of his own by the river's brim.