Studies of Contemporary Poets Part 3

Of such is "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," in which the poet is longing for his home in Cambridgeshire as he sits outside a cafe in Berlin. The poem is therefore a cry of homesickness, a modern "Oh, to be in England!" But there is much more in it than that; it is not merely a wail of emotion. The lyrical reverie which recalls all the sweet natural beauty that he is aching to return to is closely woven with other strands. So that one may catch half a dozen incidental impressions which pique the mind with contrasting effects and yet contribute to the prevailing sense of intolerable desire for home. Thus, when the poet has swung off into a sunny dream of the old house and garden, the watching sense of fact suddenly jogs him into consciousness that he is not there at all, but in a very different place. And that wakens the satiric spirit, so that an amusing interlude follows, summing up by implication much of the contrast between the English and German minds:

... _there_ the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold.

Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where _das Betreten's_ not _verboten_.

=eithe genoimen= ... would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester!--

He slips back again into the softer mood of memory, not of the immediate home scenes only, but of their a.s.sociations, historical and academic.

Always, however, that keen helmsman steers to the windward of sentimentality: better risk rough weather, it seems to say, than shipwreck on some lotus-island. And every time the boat would appear to be making fairly for an exquisite idyllic haven, she is headed into the breeze again. But though she gets a buffeting, and even threatens to capsize at one moment in boisterous jest, she comes serenely into port at last.

Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand Still guardians of that holy land?

The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream?

Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold?

And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley?

And after, ere the night is born, Do hares come out about the corn?

Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool?

And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill?

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain?... oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

_William H. Davies_

I should think that the work of Mr Davies is the nearest approach that the poetic genius could make to absolute simplicity. It is a wonderful thing, too, in its independence, its almost complete isolation from literary tradition and influence. People talk of Herrick in connexion with this poet; and if they mean no more than to wonder at a resemblance which is a marvellous accident, one would run to join them in their happy amazement. But there is no evidence of direct influence, any more than by another token we could a.s.sociate his realism with that of Crabbe. No, this is verse which has "growed," autochthonic if poetry ever were, unliterary, and spontaneous in the many senses of that word.

From that one fact alone, these seven small volumes of verse are a singular phenomenon. But they teem with interest of other kinds too.

First and foremost there is, of course, the preciousness of many of the pieces they contain, as pure poetry, undimmed by any other consideration whatsoever. That applies to a fair proportion of this work; and it is a delightsomeness which, from its very independence of time and circ.u.mstance, one looks quite soberly to last the centuries through; and if it lapse at all from favour, to be rediscovered two or three hundred years hence as we have rediscovered the poets of the seventeenth century.

It has, however, inherent interest apart from this aesthetic joy, something which catches and holds the mind, startling it with an apparent paradox. For this poetry, with its solitariness and absence of any affiliation ancient or modern, with its bird-note bubbling into song at some sweet impulse and seemingly careless of everything but the impelling rapture, is at the same time one of the grimmest pages out of contemporary life. In saying that, one pauses for a moment sternly to interrogate one's own impression. How much of this apparent paradox is due to knowledge derived from the author's astounding autobiography?

Turn painfully back for a moment to the thoughts and feelings aroused by that book: recall the rage against the stupidity of life which brings genius to birth so carelessly, endowing it with appet.i.tes too strong for the will to tame and senses too acute for the mind to leash until the soul had been buffeted and the body maimed. And admit at once that such a tale, all the more for its quiet veracity, could not fail to influence one's att.i.tude to this poetry. No doubt it is that which gives a.s.surance, certainty, the proof of actual data, to the human record adumbrated in the poems. But the record is no less present _in_ the poems. It often exists, implicit or explicit, in that part of the verse which sings because it must and for sheer love of itself. And in that other part of the work where the lyric note is not so clear: in the narrative poems and queer character-studies and little dramatic pieces, the record lives vivid and almost complete. Perhaps it is the nature of the record itself which denies full inspiration to those pieces: perhaps Mr Davies' lyric gift cannot find its most fitting expression in themes so grim: in any case it is clear that these personal pieces are not equal to the lighter songs.

Now if one's conscience were supple enough to accept those lighter songs as Mr Davies' complete work: if we could conveniently forget the autobiography, and when visualizing his output, call up some charming collected edition of the poems with the unsatisfactory ones carefully deleted, we could go on with our study easily and gaily. We might pause a moment to marvel at this 'isolated phenomenon': we might even remark upon his detachment, not only from literature, but almost as completely from the ordinary concerns of life. That done, however, we should at once take a header into the delicious refreshment of the lyrics. Such a study would be very fascinating; and from the standpoint of Art as Art, it might not be inadequate. But it would totally lack significance. Even from the point of view of pure poetry, the loss would be profound--not to realize that behind the blithest of these trills of song is a background as stormy as any winter sky behind a robin on a bare bough.

There is this one, for example, from the volume called _Foliage_:

If I were gusty April now, How I would blow at laughing Rose; I'd make her ribbons slip their knots, And all her hair come loose.

If I were merry April now, How I would pelt her cheeks with showers; I'd make carnations rich and warm, Of her vermilion flowers.

Since she will laugh in April's face, No matter how he rains or blows-- Then O that I wild April were, To play with laughing Rose.

The gaiety of that, considered simply in its lightness of heart, its verbal and metrical felicity, is a delightful thing. And it recurs so frequently as to make Mr Davies quite the jolliest of modern poets. So if we are content to stop there, if we are not teased by an instinct to relate things, and see all round them, we may make holiday pleasantly enough with this part of the poet's work. The method is not really satisfying, however, and the inclusion of the more personal pieces adds a deeper value to the study. Not merely because the facts of a poet's life are interesting in themselves, but because here especially they are illuminating, explanatory, suggestive: connecting and unifying the philosophical interest of the work, and supplying a background, curiously impressive, for its art.

For that reason one would refuse to pa.s.s over in silence Mr Davies'

first book of poems, _The Soul's Destroyer_, published in 1907. Not that it is perfect poetry: indeed, I doubt whether one really satisfying piece could be chosen from the whole fourteen. But it has deep human interest. The book is slim, sombre, almost insignificant in its paper wrappers. But its looks belie it. It is, in fact, nothing less than a flame of courage, a shining triumph of the spirit of humanity. Mr Shaw has made play with the facts of this poet's life, partly because 'it is his nature so to do,' and partly, one suspects, to hide a deeper feeling. But play as you will with the willing vagabondage, the happy irresponsibility, the weakness and excess and error of a wild youth, you will only film the surface of the tragedy. Underneath will remain those sullen questions--what is life about, what are our systems and our laws about, that a human creature and one with the miraculous spark of genius in him, is chased hungry and homeless up and down his own country, tossed from continent to continent and thrown up at last, broken and all but helpless, to be persecuted by some contemptible agent of charity and to wander from one crowded lodging-house to another, seeking vainly for a quiet corner in which to make his songs. The verses in _The Soul's Destroyer_ were written under those conditions; and by virtue of that it would seem that the drab little volume attains to spiritual magnificence.

The themes in this book and those of _New Poems_, published in the same year, are of that personal kind of which we have already spoken. But you will be quite wrong if you suppose that they are therefore gloomy. On the contrary, though there is an occasional didactic piece, like that which gives its t.i.tle to the first volume, there is more often a vein of humour. Thus we have the astonishing catalogue of lodging-house humanity in "Saints and Lodgers" with the satirical flavour of its invocation:

Ye saints, that sing in rooms above, Do ye want souls to consecrate?

And there is "The Jolly Tramp," a sc.r.a.p of autobiography, perhaps the least bit coloured:

I am a jolly tramp: I whine to you, Then whistles till I meet another fool.

I call the labourer sir, the boy young man, The maid young lady, and the mother I Will flatter through the youngest child that walks.

In "Wondering Brown" there is surely something unique in poetry: not alone in theme, and the extraordinary set of circ.u.mstances which enabled such a bit of life to be observed, by a poet, from the inside; but in the rare quality of it, its sympathetic satire, the genial incisiveness of its criticism of life:

There came a man to sell his shirt, A drunken man, in life low down; When Riley, who was sitting near, Made use of these strange words to Brown.

"Yon fallen man, that's just gone past, I knew in better days than these; Three shillings he could make a day, As an adept at picking peas."

"You'd scarcely credit it, I knew A man in this same house, low down, Who owns a fish-shop now--believe Me, or believe me not," said Brown.

"He was a civil sort of cove, But did queer things, for one low down: Oft have I watched him clean his teeth-- As true as Heaven's above!" cried Brown.

This humorous quality is the most marked form of an att.i.tude of detachment which may be observed in most of the personal pieces. So complete is this detachment sometimes, as in "Strange People" or "Scotty Bill" or "Facts," that one is tempted to a heresy. Is it possible, in view of this lightness of touch, this untroubled pace and coolness of word and phrase, that the poet did not see the implications of what he was recording, or seeing them, was not greatly moved by them? Now there are certain pa.s.sages which prove that that doubt is a heresy: that the poet did perceive and feel the complete significance of the facts he was handling. Otherwise, of course, he were no poet. There is evidence of this in such a poem as "A Blind Child," from which I quote a couple of stanzas:

We're in the garden, where are bees And flowers, and birds, and b.u.t.terflies; There is one greedy fledgling cries For all the food his parent sees!

I see them all: flowers of all kind, The sheep and cattle on the leas; The houses up the hills, and trees-- But I am dumb, for she is blind.

There is, too, the last stanza of "Facts," a narrative piece which relates the infamous treatment by workhouse officials of an old and dying man:

Since Jesus came with mercy and love, 'Tis nineteen hundred years and five: They made that dying man break stones, In faith that Christ is still alive.

A hideous sc.r.a.p of notoriety for A.D. 1905!--and proof enough to convince us of our author's humanity. At the same time, however, it is the fact that there is little sign of intense emotion in this work. One comes near it, perhaps, in a pa.s.sage in "The Forsaken Dead," where the poet is musing in the burial-place of a deserted settlement, and breaks into wrath at the tyranny which drove the people out:

Had they no dreamer who might have remained To sing for them these desolated scenes?

One who might on a starved body take Strong flights beyond the fiery larks in song, With awful music, pa.s.sionate with hate?

But that is a rare example. Deep emotion is not a feature of Mr Davies'

poetry: neither in the poems of life, which might be supposed to awaken it directly; nor, stranger still, in the infrequent love poems; nor in the lyrics of nature. It would be interesting to speculate on this, if there were any use in it--whether it is after all just a sign of excessive feeling, masked by restraint; whether it may be in some way a reaction from a life of too much sensation; or whether it simply means that emotion is nicely balanced by objective power. Perhaps an a.n.a.lysis would determine the question in the direction of a balance of power; but the fact remains that though sensibility has a wide range, though it is quick, acute and tender, it is not intense.

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that these earlier volumes are only interesting on the personal side. The pure lyric note is uttered first here: once or twice in a small perfect song, as "The Likeness" and "Parted"; but oftener in a s.n.a.t.c.h or a broken trill, as

He who loves Nature truly, hath His wealth in her kind hands; and it Is in safe trust until his death, Increasing as he uses it.

Or a pa.s.sage from "Music," invoking the memory of childhood:

O happy days of childhood, when We taught shy Echo in the glen Words she had never used before-- Ere Age lost heart to summon her.

Life's river, with its early rush, Falls into a mysterious hush When nearing the eternal sea: Yet we would not forgetful be, In these deep, silent days so wise, Of shallows making mighty noise When we were young, when we were gay, And never thought Death lived--that day.