he has, to be sure. Where have we read:
With all the joy of Spring
And morning in her eyes?
It is foolish to ask where; it would be much more sensible to put it ‘where not.’
Certainly Mi. Young challenges the spectres right smartly. He speaks of ’snow upon the
blast’ of the ‘livery of death’; his moon is quite comfortably ‘horned,’ with the
accent all nicely printed over the last syllable. But let us give him his due, his
cacophony is original. Read this aloud:
The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken
In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken.
But we must not leave Mr. Young alone in a glorious isolation; that
would be to do him too much honour, for does not Mr. Davies speak of ‘Yon full moon,’ and
Mr. Abercrombie complacently watch while ‘The sun drew off at last his piercing fires’;
even Mr. Gibson, who is usually above such diction, permits himself to call the sea ‘the
changeless deep.’
One could go on poking fun forever—there is matter for it—but the thing is
not funny; on the contrary, it is desperately sad. They want to be poets so much, these
young men. They know they have something to say, they feel it doubtless, but they are like
men uttering words in a dream; in the cold light of day, it comes perilously near
nonsense, because it is nonsense to repeat by rote a thing which does not express one’s
thoughts. There is atrophy here; this stale stuff is not merely stale, it is pathological.
We know what these young men want to say; the strong spirits among them have told us: they
want to say how deeply they love England, how much the English countryside (the most
beautiful countryside in the world) means to them; they detest war, and long for the past
which cannot come back, and they hope fiercely for a future which, if they can, they will
see to it shall be better. But the power to set down all this has been weakened by strain.
They have not the energy to see personally, or speak with their own voices. The will to do
so is strong; the nervous strength necessary for the task (and it requires much) is
lacking.
The English countryside is here, but in all the old tones and colours. Surely never
book was so swayed over by the branches of trees. Nightingales and thrushes abound, but
seldom does the poet get them alive on the page; he loves them, but he slays them, and
more’s the pity.
This is not always true. Mr. Drinkwater’s ‘Chorus from "Lincoln "’ is very
England, although not quite so fine as his ‘In Lady Street,’ which is not in this volume,
and so is Mr. de la Mare’s ‘Sunken Garden,’ and Mr. Monro’s ‘Dog’ is fully successful.
Even Mr. Davies gets himself sometimes, since he can write:
Blink with blind bats’ wings, and heaven’s bright face
Twitch with the stars that shine in thousands there.
Mr. Davies tries to be himself, and it is unfortunate that we often wish he would not.
When he describes a lark as ‘raving’ above the clouds, we feel that his vocabulary is
unwarrantably scanty, and it is nonsense to speak of the ‘merry sound of moths’ bumping on
a ceiling. ‘Merry’ — watching the tortured struggles of the poor things to get out
-merry! He tells us that he is the ‘dumb slave’ of a lady who brings ‘great bursts’ of
music out of a harpsichord; ‘deaf’ I think should be the word, for I doubt if even a Liszt
could force that frail and delicate instrument to ‘great bursts.’ Or, perish the thought,
was the lady really playing a piano, and did Mr. Davies merely think ‘harpsichord’ more
poetical?
Yes, they do try, but often only to make a mess of it. When the nightingale does not
sing, Mr. Nichols observes, ‘Nor has the moon yet touched the brown bird’s throat,’ which
is mighty fine writing of a kind usually found in ‘Parlour Albums’ and ‘Gems from the
Poets for Every Day in the Year.’ Mr. Nichols has been reading the dictionary, his boughs
are ‘labyrinthine,’ the blossom of a lime tree is a ‘Hispid star of citron bloom,’ and ‘
sigils’ are burned into his heart and face. A sort of passion for the archaic seems to
have got hold of him, we have ‘flittest, profferest, blowest, renewest,’ all in four
lines. Most of these poets love ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ that horrible second person which
everyday speech has happily got rid of. But Mr. Nichols is a good poet, only he does not
hold himself up. To speak of the trunk of a tree as ‘splitting into massy limbs’ is
excellent, but he spoils it by having the branches ‘bowered in foliage,’ and yet the man
is often full of insight. Of a squirrel, he can say: ‘He scrambled round on little
scratchy hands,’ and what could be finer than the ‘peaked and gleaming face’ of the dying
man in ‘The Sprig of Lime.’ That whole poem touches a very high mark, and sets Mr. Nichols
quite apart from the John Does.
As one glances through the four volumes of ‘Georgian Poetry,’ one cannot help wondering
on what principle they are edited. Scarcely on that of presenting all the best poetry of
the moment, it would seem, since Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, the Sitwells, and Anna
Wickham have never been included. Mr. James Stephens, who bad been in from the beginning,
has vanished, which is a great loss; and Mr. Hodgson, who appeared in the second and third
issues, has also gone. It is understandable why Mr. Chesterton, as belonging to an older
group, has left, but Mr. Masefield, by all the laws of literary relationship, should
surely have remained. Is the editor, Mr. Marsh, sole arbiter, and if so, why? When former
contributors disappear, do they remove themselves, or are they assisted to depart? And
again, in either case, why?
It is horrible to reflect on the power of an editor. Poets, at the mercy of editorial
selection, may well tremble, reflecting on the fate of the Dutch painter Vermeer, who
vanished for nearly three hundred years from the knowledge of men because a contemporary
writer with whom he was so ill-advised as to quarrel omitted him from a list of painters
which was destined to become the textbook of future generations.
Mr. Marsh edits with well-defined prejudices, evidently, but, on the whole, he has
accomplished much, for he has brought the authors of his anthologies a wide publicity. For
those who go out, others come in. Mr. Graves, and Mr. Sassoon, who, with Mr. Squire,
appeared first in the 1916-17 anthology, are the chiefs of the newcomers. The most
powerful poem in the book is Mr. Sassoon’s ‘Repression of War Experience.’ The war made
Mr. Sassoon a poet. He needed to be torn and shaken by a great emotion; he has found this
emotion in his detestation of war. Nothing stronger than these poems, which are the
outgrowth of his suffering, has been written in England since the war ’stopped our
clocks.’ It would be hard to make a selection of them, and really it does not matter; one
side of a heart is a good deal like the other side provided it be a real flesh and blood
heart. In this case it is, and wherever you take it, you get the same sensation. There is
no rhetoric here, we are not treated to erudite expressions nor literary artifices, and
for that reason these poems, and ‘Repression’ especially, come perilously near to being
great. I say ‘perilously,’ for what is Mr. Sassoon going to do now? When was ‘Everyone
Sang’ written? Perhaps that points a new departure.
Mr. Sassoon and Mr. Graves feel so much that they can afford to joke about it. Mr.
Sassoon’s joking is a shade more bitter, more ironical. For instance, ‘What Does It
Matter?’ is a trifle harder and heavier than Mr. Graves’s ‘It’s a Queer Time,’ which
unfortunately is not in this volume. Neither is ‘I Wonder What It Feels Like to be
Drowned.’ But one cannot have all a man’s collected works in an anthology, and we have got
that fine thing, ‘A Frosty Night,’ and the possibly even finer ‘The Cupboard.’ Mr. Graves
is that delightful being among poets, a faux naif. He runs his ballad
forms hard but so far they do not fade upon the palate.
Miss Shove is a notable addition to this year’s anthology. She has originality and a
saving sense of the grotesque and macabre. ‘The New Ghost’ is excellent.
Of the original contributors, Mr. Abercrombie’s poetry is always a strange mixture of
the quick and the dead. He builds live tales on a pattern of rusty pins. The result is
according as one feels about the vexed question of subject and treatment. I confess that I
find Mr. Abercrombie worthy of respect, but dull.
Mr. Davies has ardent admirers, and I am quite aware that my making him sit as part
portrait for the highly estimable John Doe will probably cause much offence. If only Mr.
Davies would always write poems like ‘A Child’s Pet,’ would always keep to such natural
speech as that in the first four lines of ‘England,’ I would readily subtract him from the
sum total of my composite hero. But Mr. Davies has read books, and they have remained in
his mind alien and undigested. Therefore he must give his quota to John Doe, and I
regretfully beg his pardon.
Mr. de la Mare is scarcely at his best in this volume, although ‘The Sunken Garden’ is
very charming. But I cannot forgive him his last line with the false rhyme. False rhyming
is often a most happy device, but scarcely here, where there have been no other such
rhymes in the poem, and for the last line — particularly when he had a perfect rhyme in
his adjective! Clearly the sound did not trouble Mr. de la Mare’s ear, but it teases mine
horribly.
Mr. Drinkwater is a poet who must be read in a certain mood. His poems do not yield all
their fragrance if they are hastily approached or violently attempted. They grow on the
reader as of something becoming conscious. They seem extraordinarily simple, by every
preconceived canon they should be dull, and behold, they are neither the one nor the
other. The best of them, that is, and two of the best are here: ‘Moonlit Apples’ and
‘Habitation,’ while ‘Chorus from "Lincoln,"’ the first half especially, is
nearly as good. What is Mr. Drinkwater’s charm? how does he escape the sensation of echo,
considering that he chooses to write in a traditional mode? To analyse it with any care
would take up too much space here; in brief, I think it lies in his utter abandonment to
his poem, in his complete sincerity in regard to it, in his straightforward,
unselfconscious love of what he is writing about. He is a quiet poet, he keeps his drama
for his plays, but his dramatic sense has taught him the secret of creating atmosphere.
‘Moonlit Apples’ is beautifully moony. But this simplicity and this atmosphere are not
accidental; they are built up with delicate touch after touch throughout the poem. One
could wish that ‘In Lady Street’ had been included and ‘Southampton Bells’ left out, but,
on the whole, his selection is one of the best in the book.
Mr. Gibson’s ‘Cakewalk’ is a good poem, and so is the first stanza of ‘Parrots’; the
latter is a complete poem by itself; the second stanza adds nothing, it even detracts
appreciably. Why must Mr. Gibson bring in his heart? the Parrots did so well without it.
Mr. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Seals’ is in his most mystical and passionate vein. The poem is
serious and exalted, but it is a pity that it should be his only contribution; it would
stand better were it companioned. As a, poet, Mr. Lawrence is rising in stature year by
year; his last volume, ‘Bay,’ is the best book of poetry, pure poetry, that he has
written, although it does not reach the startling human poignance of ‘Look! We Have Come
Through.’ It is unfair to Mr. Lawrence to be represented by one poem; the editor should
take heed and give us more of him in future.
Mr. Monro improves steadily. I have already mentioned his beautiful and exceedingly
satisfactory ‘Dog.’ I wish I had space to quote it. It is not only good poetry, but good
dog. Mr. Monro’s work is gaining in muscle. Beauty it has often had, but now there is a
firm structure under the beauty — see, for instance, ‘Man Carrying Bail.’ ‘The
Nightingale Near the House’ was a bold challenge to Fate, but Mr. Monro has come through
fairly successfully. His nightingale lives and sings, and not too reminiscently, which is
much for a modern nightingale to do.
For the newer men, Mr. Squire is a clever fellow. His criticisms, even if one disagree
with them, are always interesting. His poetry is clever too, and that is not so useful an
attribute in poetry. But he has done some good things. ‘August Moon,’ with its marvellous
description of moonlight on water, is not here (really we must quarrel with the editor for
leaving it out) but another of his best things, the ‘Sonnet,’ is. Few modern sonnets are
as good as this; the last two lines are magnificent. ‘Rivers’ begins well, with an
original and fluctuating rhythm which gives the lapsing and flowing of river to a
remarkable degree, and the slight change between the first and second stanza is well
conceived. But then he becomes tangled in his own creation, the metre stiffens into a
convention, be comes hard, unimaginative, and cold, and t poem loses itself in a long and
rather stupid catalogue.
Mr. Turner, who appears for the second time, has a nice little quality — he has his
own turns, and a very pleasant whimsical touch:
The thronged, massed, crowded multitude of leaves
Hung like dumb tongues that loll and gasp for air
gives an effect we have all seen, most vividly. ‘Tinkling like polished tin’ has the
thin sharpness of tone of a small stream, and ‘ old wives cried their wares, like queer
day owls’ is very nice. ‘Silence’ is a good poem, but the best of those here is ‘Talking
With Soldiers,’ with its refra