The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 7

The door is open; you are free to go.

Why do you tarry? Are you not afraid?

Go, ere I hate you. I'll not hinder you.

I would not have you bound to me by fear.

Don't fear to leave me; rather fear to bide With me who am my father's very son.

Go, la.s.s, while yet I love you!

ESTHER (closing the door). I shall bide.

I have heard all; and yet, I would not go.

Nor would I have a single word unsaid.

I loved you, husband; yet, I did not know you Until your mother spoke. I know you now; And I am not afraid.

The first piece in _Stonefolds_ represents the tragic helplessness of those newly born and those very old, a favourite theme with Maeterlinck. A lamb and a child are born on the same night, and both die before dawn. The lamb is a poetic symbol of babyhood.

Nicholas, the aged shepherd, who longs to go out into the night and do his share of the work that must be done, but who is unable even to move, thus addresses the dying lamb:

Poor, bleating beast! We two are much alike, At either end of life, though scarce an hour You've been in this rough world, and I so long That death already has me by the heels; For neither of us can stir to help himself, But both must bleat for others' aid. This world Is rough and bitter to the newly born, But far more bitter to the nearly dead.

In _Daily Bread_ (1908-09), there are eighteen brief plays, written not in orthodox blank verse, like _Stonefolds_, but in irregular, brittle, breathless metres. Here is where art takes the short cut to life, sacrificing every grace to gain reality; the typical goal and method of twentieth-century poetry. So long as a vivid impression of character and circ.u.mstance is produced, the writer apparently cares nothing about style. I say "apparently," because the styleless style is perhaps the one best adapted to produce the sought-for effect. There is ever one difference between life and "art"--between drama and theatre--that Mr. Gibson has, I suppose, tried to cancel in these poems of daily bread. In art, the bigger the drama, the bigger the stage; one could not mount _Gotterdammerung_ in a village schoolhouse. But Life does not fit the splendour of the setting to the grandeur of the struggle. In bleak farm cottages, in dull dwellings in city blocks, in slum tenements, the greatest of life's tragedies and comedies are enacted--love, hate, avarice, jealousy, revenge, birth, death--the most terrific pa.s.sions known to human nature are fully presented, without the slightest care for appropriate scenery from the Master of the show. Thus our poet leads us by the hand into sea-girt huts, into hovels at the mouths of mines, into garrets of noisy cities, and makes us silent witnesses of elemental woe. Here Labour, man's greatest blessing, takes on the aspect of the primal curse, since so many tragedies spring from the simple root of poverty. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the lack of it is the cause of much pain.

It was a happy inspiration that made Mr. Gibson call these scenes _Daily Bread_; for it is the struggle, not for comfort, but for existence, that drives these men from mother, wife, and child into the thick of the fight. Many novels and plays are written nowadays against "big business," where, among other real and imagined evils, the Business itself is represented as the villain in the home, alienating the husband's affections from wife and children. Whatever may be the case with the private soldiers, the Captain of Industry does not, and by the nature of things cannot, confine his labours to an eight-hour day--when he finally comes home, he brings the business with him, forming a more well-founded cause of jealousy than the one usually selected for conventional drama. Mr. Gibson, however, is not interested in the tragic few, but in the tragic many, and in his poems the man of the house leaves early and returns late. The industrial war caused by social conditions takes him from home as surely and as perilously as though he were drafted into an expeditionary force. The daily parting is poignant, for every member of the family knows he may not come back. Perhaps the most dramatic ill.u.s.tration of this corroding worry is seen in _The Night-Shift_, where four women with a newly-born baby spend a night of agonized waiting, only to have their fears confirmed in the dawn.

The wife, weak from childbirth, sits up in bed, and speaks:

Will no one stop that tapping?

I cannot sleep for it.

I think that someone is shut in somewhere, And trying to get out.

Will no one let them out, And stop the tapping?

It keeps on tapping, tapping....

Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap....

And I can scarcely breathe, The darkness is so thick.

It stifles me, And weighs so heavily upon me, And drips, and drips....

My hair is wet already; There's water all about my knees....

As though great rocks were hanging overhead!

And dripping, dripping....

I cannot lift my feet, The water holds them, It's creeping ... creeping ... creeping....

My wet hair drags me down.

Ah, G.o.d!

Will no one stop that tapping....

I cannot sleep....

And I would sleep Till he comes home....

Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap....

These poems were, of course, composed before the war. In the greater tragedy, some of the lesser ones disappear. For example, Mr. Gibson represents young, able-bodied, healthy and temperate men as unable to find work of any kind; their wives and children starve because of the absence of employment. Surely, since August, 1914, this particular cause of suffering has been removed.

In _Womenkind_ (1909), dedicated to Rabbi and Mrs. Wise, we have a real play, not only dramatic in character and situation, but fitted for stage representation without the change of a word. The theme is just the opposite of Middleton's old drama, _Women Beware Women_.

Here the two young women, one the mistress-mother, and one the bride, join forces against the man, and walk out of his house on the wedding-day. They feel that the tie between them is stronger than the tie which had united them severally to the man, and depart to live together. The play closes on a note of irony, for Jim, his blind father, and his weary mother repeat in turn--but with quite different emphasis--the accusation that women are a faithless lot.

The long series of poems called _Fires_ (1910-11) differ in matter and manner from the earlier works. The form of drama is abandoned, and in its place we have vivid rimed narrative, mingled with glowing pictures of natural scenery, taken at all hours of the day and night. Each of his poems must be taken as a whole, for each poem strives for a single effect. This effect is often gained by taking some object, animate or inanimate, as a symbol. Thus, in _The Hare_, the hunted animal is the symbol of woman. _The Flute_, _The Lighthouse_, and _The Money_ mean more than their definition. Mr. Gibson is somewhat kinder to his readers in this collection, for the monotony of woe, that hangs over his work like a cloud, is rifted here and there by a ray of happiness. In _The Shop_, the little boy actually recovers from pneumonia, and our share in the father's delight is heightened by surprise, for whenever any of our poet's characters falls into a sickness, we have learned to expect the worst. Still, the darker side of life remains the author's chosen field of exploration. Two pieces are so uncanny that one might almost think they proceeded from a disordered imagination. The blind boy, who every day has rowed his father back and forth from the fishing-grounds, while the man steered, one day rows cheerfully toward home, unaware that his father is dead. The boy wonders at his father's silence, and laughingly a.s.serts that he has heard him snoring. Then his mirth changes to fear, and fear to horror.

Though none has ever known How he rowed in, alone, And never touched a reef.

Some say they saw the dead man steer-- The dead man steer the blind man home-- Though, when they found him dead, His hand was cold as lead.

Another strange poem describes how a cripple sits in his room, with a mother eternally st.i.tching for bread, and watches out of the window the giant crane swinging vast weights through the sky. One night, while he is half-dead with fear, the great crane swoops down upon him, clutches his bed, and swings him, bed and all, above the sleeping city, among the blazing stars.

Following Mr. Gibson's development as a poet, year by year, we come to _Thoroughfares_ (1908-14). These are short poems more conventional in form than their predecessors, but just as stark and grim as chronicles of life. Every one remembers the torture inflicted on women in the good-old-times, when they were strapped to posts on the flats at low tide, and allowed to watch the cruel slowness of approaching death. The same theme, with an even more terrible termination, is selected by Mr. Gibson in _Solway Ford_, where the carter is pinned by the heavy, overturned wagon on the sands; while the tide gradually brings the water toward his helpless body. He dies a thousand deaths in imagination, but is rescued just as the waves are lapping the wheels. Now he lies in bed, an incurable idiot, smiling as he sees gold and sapphire fishes swimming in the water over his head.... That rarest of all English metres--which Browning chose for _One Word More_--is employed by Mr. Gibson in a compound of tragedy-irony called _The Vindictive Staircase_. Unfortunately the rhythm is so closely a.s.sociated with Browning's love-poem, that these lines sound like a parody:

Mrs. Murphy, timidest of spectres, You who were the cheeriest of charers, With the heart of innocence and only Torn between a zest for priest and porter, Mrs. Murphy of the ample bosom,-- Suckler of a score or so of children.

It seems best to leave this measure in the undisturbed possession of the poet who used it supremely well. Yet some of the verses in _Thoroughfares_ are an advance on Mr. Gibson's previous work. No reader will ever forget _Wheels_.

Pa.s.sing over _Borderlands_ (1912-14) which, with the exception of _Akra_, is the least successful of Mr. Gibson's works, we come to his most original contribution to modern poetry, the short poems included under the heading _Battle_ (1914-15). These verses afford one more bit of evidence that in order to write unconventional thoughts, it is not necessary to use unconventional forms. The ideas expressed here can be found in no other war-poet; they are idiosyncratic to the highest degree; yet the verse-forms in which they are written are stanzaic, as traditional as the most conservative critic could desire. There is, of course, no reason why any poet should not compose in new and strange rhythms if he prefers to do so; but I have never believed that originality in thought _necessarily_ demands metrical measures other than those found in the history of English literature.

These lyrical poems are dramatic monologues. Each one is the testimony of some soldier in the thick of the fight as to what he has seen or heard, or as to what memories are strongest in his mind as he lies in the filth of the trenches. Conventional emotions of enthusiasm, glory, sacrifice, courage, are omitted, not because they do not exist, but simply because they are taken for granted; these boys are aflame with such feelings at the proper time. But Mr. Gibson is more interested in the strange, fantastic thoughts, waifs of memory, that wander across the surface of the mind in the midst of scenes of horror. And we feel that the more fantastic these thoughts are, the more do they reflect the deep truths of experience. Home naturally looms large, and some of the recollections of home take on a grim humour, strangely in contrast with the present environment of the soldier.

HIS FATHER

I quite forgot to put the spigot in.

It's just come over me.... And it is queer To think he'll not care if we lose or win.

And yet be jumping-mad about that beer.

I left it running full. He must have said A thing or two. I'd give my stripes to hear What he will say if I'm reported dead Before he gets me told about that beer!

It would appear that the world has grown up, or at all events, grown much older, during the last forty years. It has grown older at a high rate of speed. The love of country is the same as ever, because that is a primal human pa.s.sion, that will never change, any more than the love of the s.e.xes; but the expression of battle-poems seems more mature, more sophisticated, if you like, in this war than in any preceding conflict. Most of the verses written in England and in America are as different as may be from "Just before the battle, mother," which was so popular during our Civil War. Never before has the psychology of the soldier been so acutely studied by national poets. And instead of representing the soldier as a man swayed by a few elemental pa.s.sions and lush sentiment, he is presented as an extraordinarily complex individual, with every part of his brain abnormally alert. Modern poetry, in this respect, has, I think, followed the lead of the realistic prose novel. Such books as Tolstoi's _Sevastopol_, and Zola's _La Debacle_, have had a powerful effect in making war poetry more a.n.a.lytical; while that original story, _The Red Badge of Courage_, written by an inspired young American, Stephen Crane, has left its mark on many a volume of verse that has been produced since August, 1914. The unabashed realism of the trenches, together with the psychology of the soldier, is clearly and significantly reflected in _From the Front_ (1918), a book of poems written by men in service, edited by Lieut. C. E. Andrews.

What is going to become of us all if the obsession of self-consciousness grows ever stronger?

There is not a trace of cheap sentiment in _Battle_. Even the poems that come nearest to the emotional surface are saved by some specific touch, like the sense of smell, which, as every one knows, is a sharper spur to the memory than any other sensation.

Tonight they're sitting by the peat Talking of me, I know-- Grandfather in the ingle-seat, Mother and Meg and Joe.

I feel a sudden puff of heat That sets my ears aglow, And smell the reek of burning peat Across the Belgian snow.

Browning wrote of Sh.e.l.ley, who had been dead eleven years,

_The air seems bright with thy past presence yet._

A similar effect of brightness in life and afterglow in death, seems to have been made on every one who knew him by Rupert Brooke. No young poet of the twentieth century has left such a flaming glory as he. The prefatory poem to Mr. Gibson's _Friends_ (1915-16), beautifully expresses the common feeling:

He's gone.

I do not understand.

I only know That as he turned to go And waved his hand In his young eyes a sudden glory shone: And I was dazzled by a sunset glow, And he was gone.

The fine sonnets that follow strengthen the strong colour, and are among the most authentic claims to poetry that their author has set forth. The second one, contrasting the pale glimmer of the London garret with the brilliant apparition of Brooke at the open door, "like sudden April," is poignant in its beauty. The verses in this volume are richer in melody than is customary with Mr. Gibson, yet _The Pessimist_ and _The Ice-Cart_ show that he is as whimsical as ever. He has no end of fun with his fancy.

_Livelihood_ (1914-16) takes us back to the bitter pessimism of _Stonefolds_ and _Daily Bread_; only instead of being dialogues, these stories are given in descriptive form, and for the most part in regular pentameter rime. The best of them is _In the Orchestra_, where the poor fiddler in the band at the cheap music-hall plays mechanically every night for his daily bread, while his heart is torn by the vulture of memory. This poem shows a firm grasp of the material; every word adds something to the total impression.

Mr. Gibson's constantly repeated pictures of the grinding, soul-crushing labour of the poor seem to say _J'accuse_! Yet he nowhere says it explicitly. He never interrupts his narrative with "My Lords and Gentlemen," nor does he comment, like Hood in _The Song of the Shirt_.

Yet the effect of his work is an indictment. Only, whom does he accuse? Is it the government; is it society; is it G.o.d?