STUDIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

By MARY C. STURGEON AUTHOR OF "WOMEN OF THE CLASSICS" ETC.

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY MCMXVI

PRINTED AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS LONDON, ENGLAND

TO

PROFESSOR W. H. HUDSON

IN GRATITUDE AND ESTEEM

[Pg 7]

Acknowledgment

The author begs to offer warm thanks to the following poets and their publishers, for the use of the quotations given in these studies:

Mr Masefield and "John Presland"; Mr John Lane for the work of Mr Abercrombie and Mrs Woods; Messrs Sidgwick and Jackson for the work of Miss Macaulay and Rupert Brooke; Mr A. C. Fifield and Mr Elkin Mathews for the work of Mr W. H. Davies; Messrs Constable for the work of Mr de la Mare; Mr Elkin Mathews, New Numbers, and the Samurai Press for the work of Mr W. W. Gibson; the Poetry Bookshop for the work of Mr Hodgson; Messrs Max Goschen Ltd. for the work of Mr Ford Madox Hueffer; Messrs Maunsel and Co Ltd for the work of the members of "An Irish Group" and of Mr Stephens; the Samurai Press and the Poetry Bookshop for the work of Mr Monro; and Mr William Heinemann for the work of Mrs Naidu.

[Pg 9]

Lascelles Abercrombie

In the sweet chorus of modern poetry one may hear a strange new harmony. It is the life of our time, evoking its own music: constraining the poetic spirit to utter its own message. The peculiar beauty of contemporary poetry, with all its fresh and varied charm, grows from that; and in that, too, its vitality is assured. Its art has the deep sanction of loyalty: its loyalty draws inspiration from the living source.

There is a fair company of these new singers; and it would seem that there should be large hope for a generation, whether in its life or letters, which can find such expression. Listening carefully, however, some notes ring clearer, stronger, or more significant than others; and of these the voice of Mr Abercrombie appears to carry the fullest utterance. It is therefore a happy chance that the name which stands first here, under a quite arbitrary arrangement, has also a natural right to be put at the head of such a group of moderns.

But that is not an implicit denial to those others of fidelity to their time. It is a question of degree and of range. Every poet in this band will be found to represent some aspect of our complex life—its awakened social conscience or its frank joy in the[Pg 12] world of sense: its mysticism or its repudiation of dogma, in art as in religion: its mistrust of materialism or keen perception of reality: its worship of the future, or assimilation of the heritage of the past to its own ideals: its lyrical delight in life or dramatic re-creation of it: its insistence upon the essential poetry of common things, or its discovery of rare new values in experience and expression.

This poetry frequently catches one or another of those elements, and crystallizes it out of a mere welter into definite form and recognizable beauty. But the claim for Mr Abercrombie is that he has drawn upon them more largely: that he has made a wider synthesis: that his work has a unity more comprehensive and complete. It is in virtue of this that he may be said to represent his age so fully; but that is neither to accuse him of shouting with the crowd, nor to lay on the man in the street the burden of the poet's idealism. He is, indeed, in a deeper sense than politics could make him, a democrat: perhaps that inheres in the poetic temperament. But intellectuality like his, vision so brilliant, a spirit so keen and a sensuous equipment so delicate and bountiful are not to be leashed to the common pace. That is a truism, of course: so often it seems to be the destiny of the poet to[Pg 13] be at once with the people and above them. But it needs repetition here, because it applies with unusual force. This is a poet whose instinct binds him inescapably to

his kind, while all the time his genius is soaring where the average mind may sometimes find it hard to follow.

One is right, perhaps, in believing that this particular affinity with his time is instinctive, for it reveals itself in many ways, subtler or more obvious, through all his work. As forthright avowal it naturally occurs most in his earlier poems. There is, for example, the humanitarianism of the fine "Indignation" ode in his first volume, called Interludes and Poems. This is an invocation of righteous anger against the deplorable conditions of the workers' lives. A fierce impulse drives through the ode, in music that is sometimes troubled by its own vehemence.

In the same volume there is a passage which may be said to present the obverse of this idea. It occurs in an interlude called "An Escape," and is only incidental to the main theme, which is much more abstract than that of the ode. A young poet, Idwal, has withdrawn from the society of his friends, to meditate about life among the hills. All the winter long he has kept in solitude, his spirit seeking for mastery over material things. As the spring dawns he is on the verge of triumph, and the soul is about to put off for ever its veil of sense, when news reaches him from the outer world. His little house, from which he has been absent so long, has been broken into, and robbed, by a tramp. The friend who comes to tell about it ends his tale by a word of sympathy—"I'm sorry for you"—and Idwal replies:

Evidence less direct but equally strong is visible in the later work. It lies at the very root of the tragedy of Deborah, a heroine drawn from fisher-folk, who in the extremity of fear for her lover's life cries:

And it is found again, gathering materials for the play called The End of the World out of the lives of poor and simple people. Here the impulse is clear enough, but sometimes it takes a subtler form, and then it occasionally betrays the poet into a solecism. For his sense of the unity of the race is so strong that natural distinctions sometimes go the way of artificial ones. He has so completely identified himself with humanity, and for preference with the lowly in mind and estate, that he has not seldom endowed a humble personality with his own large gifts. Thus you find Deborah using this magnificent plea for her sweetheart's life:

[Pg 16]

Thus, too, a working wainwright suddenly startled into consciousness of the purpose of the life-force muses:

And with the same largesse a fiddling vagabond, old and blind, thief, liar, and seducer, is made to utter a lyric ecstasy on the words which are the poet's instrument:

Now, since Synge has shown us that the poetry in the peasant heart does utter itself spontaneously, in fitting language, we must be careful how we deny, even to these peasants who are not Celts, a natural power of poetic expression. But there is a difference. That spontaneous poetry of simple folk which is caught for us in The Playboy of the Western World or The Well of the Saints, is generally a lyric utterance springing directly out of emotion. It is not, as here, the result of a mental process, operating amongst ideas and based on knowledge which the peasant is unlikely to possess. One may be justified, therefore, in a show of protest at the incongruity; we feel that such people do not talk like that. The poet has transferred to them too much of his own intellectuality. Yet it will probably be a feeble protest, proportionate to the degree that we are disturbed by it, which is practically not at all. For as these people speak, we are convinced of their reality: they live and move before us. And when we consider their complete and robust

individuality, it would appear that the poet's method is vindicated by the dramatic[Pg 18] force of the presentment. It needs no other vindication, and is no doubt a reasoned process. For Mr Abercrombie makes no line of separation between thought and emotion; and having entered by imagination into the hearts of his people, he might claim to be merely interpreting them—making conscious and vocal that which was already in existence there, however obscurely. There is a hint of this at a point in The End of the World where one of the men says that he had felt a certain thought go through his mind—"though 'twas a thing of such a flight I could not read its colour." And in this way Deborah, being a human soul of full stature, sound of mind and body and all her being flooded with emotion, would be capable of feeling the complex thought attributed to her, even if no single strand of its texture had ever been clear in her mind. While as to the fiddling lyrist, rogue and poet, one sees no reason why the whole argument should not be closed by a gesture in the direction of Heine or Villon.

We turn now to the content of thought in Mr Abercrombie's poetry—an aspect of his genius to be approached with diffidence by a writer conscious of limitations. For though we believed we saw that his affinity with the democratic spirit of his age is instinctive, deeply rooted[Pg 19] and persistent, his genius is by no means ruled by instinct. It is intellectual to an extreme degree, moving easily in abstract thought and apparently trained in philosophic speculation. Indeed, his speculative tendency had gone as far as appeared to be legitimate in poetry, when he wisely chose another medium for it in the volume of prose Dialogues published in 1913.

It must not be gathered from this, however, that the philosophic pieces are dull or difficult reading. On the contrary, they are frequently cast into the form of a story with a dramatic basis; and although the torrent of thought sometimes keeps the mind astretch to follow it, it would be hard to discover a single obscure line. An astonishing combination of qualities has gone to produce this result: subtlety with vigour, delicacy with strength, and loftiness with simplicity. Things elusive and immaterial are caught and fixed in vivid imagery; and often charged with poignant human interest. No other modern poet expresses thought so abstract with such force, or describes the adventures of the voyaging soul with such clarity. It suggests high harmony in the development of sense and spirit: it explains the apparent incompatibility between his rapture of delight in the physical world and his spiritual[Pg 20] exaltation: while it hints a reason for his preoccupation with the duality in human life, and his vision of an ultimate union of the rival powers.

We may note in passing how this reacts upon the form of his work. It has created a unique vocabulary (enriched from many sources but derived from no single one), which is nervous, flexible, vigorous, impassioned: assimilating to its grave beauty words homely, colloquial or quaint, until the range of it seems all but infinite.

Again, rather curiously, the thought has tended toward the dramatic form. At first glance that form would seem to be unsuitable for the expression of reflectiveness so deep as this. Yet here is a poet whose dominant theme might be defined, tritely, as the development of the soul; and he hardly ever writes in any other way.

The fact sends us back to the contrast with the Victorians. The representative poet then, musing about life and death and the evolution of the soul, felt himself impelled to the elegiac form, or the idyll. But the nature of the thought itself has changed. The representative poet now does not stand and lament, however exquisitely, because reality has shattered dogma: neither does he try to create an epic out of the incredible theme of a perfect soul. He accepts reality; and then he[Pg 21] perceives that the perfect soul is incredible, besides being poor material for his art. But on the other hand, while he takes care to seize and hold fast truth: while it does not occur to him to mourn that she is implacable: he resolutely denies to phenomena, the appearance of things, the whole of truth. That is to say, he has transcended at once the despair of the Victorians and their materialism. He has banished their lyric grief for a dead past, along with their scientific and religious dogmas. That was a bit of iconoclasm imperatively demanded of

him by his own soul; but from the fact that he is a poet, it is denied to him to find final satisfaction in the region of sense and consciousness.

Thus there arises a duality, and a sense of conflict, which would account for the manner of his expression, without the need to refer it to the general tendency of modern poetry towards the dramatic form. Doubtless, however, that also has been an influence, for the virility of his genius and the positive strain in his philosophy would lead that way.

One can hardly say that there are perceptible stages in Mr Abercrombie's thought. He is one of the few poets with no crudities to repent, either artistic or philosophic. Yet there is a poem in his first volume, a morality called[Pg 22] "The New God"; and there is another piece called "The Sale of St Thomas," first published in 1911, which are relatively simple. Here he is content to take material that is traditional, both to poetry and religion, and infuse into it so much of modern significance as it will carry. The first re-tells the mediæval legend of a girl changed by God into his own likeness in order to save her from violence. There is, apt to our present study, but too long to give in full, at least one passage that is magnificent in conception and imagery alike. It is the voice of God, answering the girl's prayer that she may be saved by the destruction of her beauty. The voice declares that the petition is sweet and shall be granted, that he will quit the business of the universe, that he will "put off the nature of the world," and become

The "Sale of St Thomas" also treats a legend, with originality and power. This remarkable poem is already well known: but one may at least call attention to the fitness and dignity with which the poet has placed the modern gospel upon the lips of the Christ. Thomas has been intercepted by his master, as he is about to run away for the second time from his mission to India.

[Pg 23]

Perhaps the thought here is not so simple as the pellucid expression makes it to appear: yet the conventional material on which the poet is working restrains it to at least relative simplicity. When,[Pg 24] however, his inspiration is moving quite freely, unhampered by tradition either of technique or of theme, the result is more complex and more characteristic.

The tragedy called "Blind", in his first volume, is an example. The plot of this dramatic piece is probably unique. If one gave the bald outline of it, it might seem to be merely a story of crude revenge. It is concerned with rude and outlawed people: it springs out of elemental passions—fierce love turned to long implacable hatred, and then reverting to tenderness and pity and overwhelming remorse. And yet there are probably no subtler studies in poetry than the three persons of this little drama—the woman who has reared her idiot son to be the weapon to avenge her wrongs upon the father he has never known: the blind son himself; and his father, the same fiddling tramp whom we have already noted. There are points in the delineation of all three which are very brilliantly imagined: the change in the woman when she meets at last the human wreck who had once been her handsome lover: the idiot youth hungering to express the beauty which is revealed to him, through touch, in a child's golden hair, the warmth of fire, the mysterious presence of the dark:

[Pg 25]

But, above all, there is the character of the fiddler. At first glance, the phenomenon looks common enough and all its meaning obvious. "A wastrel" one would say, glibly defining the phenomenon; and add "a drunken wastrel," believing that we had explained it. But the poet sees further, apprehends more and understands better. Drunken indeed, but an intoxication older and more divine than that of brandy began the business; and much brandy had not quenched the elder fire. It flamed in him still, mostly a sinister glow, fed from his bad and sorrowful past, but leaping on occasion to fair radiance, as in the talk with his unknown son, when some magnetic influence drew the two blind men together and made them friends before they had any knowledge of relationship. Of the many finer touches in this poem, none is more delicate and none more moving than the suggestion of unconscious affinity between these two: the idiot,[Pg 26] with his half-awake mind, groping amidst shadows of ideas which to the older man are quick with inspiration.

But besides his dramatic and psychological interest, the fiddler is important because he seems to represent the poet's philosophy in its brief iconoclastic phase. For we find placed in his lips a destructive satire of the old theological doctrine of Good and Evil. The passage is too long to quote, and it would be unfair to mutilate it. Incidentally we may note, however, the keen salt humour of it, and how that quality establishes the breadth and sanity of the poet's outlook. The point of peculiar interest at the moment is that this phase passes with the particular poem—an early one; and thenceforward it is replaced by more constructive thought. We come to "The Fool's Adventure," for instance, and find the "Seeker" travelling through all the regions of mind and spirit to find God, and the nature and cause of sin. His quest brings him first to the Self of the World, and he believes that this is God. But the Sage corrects him:

[Pg 27]

And when, finally, he has won through to a certain palace at the "verge of things," he cries his question to the unseen king within.

Another aspect of the same idea, caught in a more lyrical mood, will be found in the poem called "The Trance." The poet is standing upon a hill-side alone at night, watching the "continual stars" and overawed by the vastness and "fixt law" of the universe. Then, in a sudden revelation of perhaps a fraction of a minute:

That, however, is the triumphant ecstasy of a moment. More often he is preoccupied with the duality in human nature, and in "An Escape" there is a fine simile of the struggle:

The incidence of finite and infinite is felt with equal force: sense is as powerful as spirit, and therein of course lives the keenness of the strife. In "Soul and Body" there is a passage—only one of many, however—in which the rapture of sensuous beauty is expressed. The spirit is imagined to be just ready to put off sense, to be for ever caught out of[Pg 29] "that corner, consciousness." And the body reminds it:

We may take our last illustration of this subject from a passage at the end of the volume called Emblems of Love. It is from a poem so rich in beauty and so closely wrought, that to quote from it is almost inevitably to do the author an injustice. But the same may be said about the whole book: while single poems from it will disclose high individual value, both as art and philosophy, their whole effect and meaning can only be completely seized by reading them as a sequence, and in the light of the conception to which they all contribute.