Henley repudiated this languid æstheticism; he scorned a negative art which was out of touch with the world. His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that mere existence was glorious; life was coarse, difficult, often dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hungers of man; it could not flourish only on its own essences or technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would have to share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the prosaic world. And so Henley came like a swift salt breeze blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of the joy of living and the courage of the "unconquerable soul." He was a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a critic and editor. In the latter capacity he gathered about him such men as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, T. E. Brown, J. M. Barrie. None of these men were his disciples, but none of them came into contact with him without being influenced in some way by his sharp and positive personality. A pioneer and something of a prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor Rodin.
If at times Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscular and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for nobility in whatever cause it was joined. He never disdained the actual world in any of its moods—bus-drivers, hospital interiors, scrubwomen, a panting train, the squalor of London's alleys, all found a voice in his lines—and his later work contains more than a hint of the delight in science and machinery which was later to be sounded more fully in the work of Rudyard Kipling.
In 1889, William Butler Yeats published hisWanderings of Oisin; in the same year Douglas Hyde, the scholar and folk-lorist, brought out hisBook of Gaelic Stories.
The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish literature may be said to date from the publication of those two books. The fundamental idea of both men and their followers was the same. It was to create a literature which would express the national consciousness of Ireland through a purely national art. They began to reflect the strange background of dreams, politics, suffering and heroism that is immortally Irish. This community of fellowship and aims is to be found in the varied but allied work of William Butler Yeats, "A. E." (George W. Russell), Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, Padraic Colum and others. The first fervor gone, a short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new significance, it seemed for a while that the movement would lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the tramp, followed; an interest that was something of a reaction against the influence of Yeats and his mystic otherworldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic Revival reached its height with John Millington Synge, who was not only the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote such contrary critics as George Moore and Harold Williams) "one of the greatest dramatists who has written in English." Synge's poetry, brusque and all too small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to serve as a bold banner—a sort of a brilliant Jolly Roger—for the younger men of the following period. It was not only this dramatist's brief verses and his intensely musical prose but his sharp prefaces that were to exercise such an influence.
In the notable introduction to thePlayboy of the Western World, Synge declared, "When I was writingThe Shadow of the Glensome years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter is, I think, of some importance; for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words—and at the same time to give the reality which is at the root of all poetry, in a natural and comprehensive form." This quotation explains his idiom, possibly the sharpest-flavored and most vivid in modern literature.
As to Synge's poetic power, it is unquestionably greatest in his plays. InThe Well of the Saints,The Playboy of the Western WorldandRiders to the Seathere are more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan times. Yeats, when he first heard Synge's early one-act play,The Shadow of the Glen, is said to have exclaimed "Euripides." A half year later when Synge read himRiders to the Sea, Yeats again confined his enthusiasm to a single word:—"Æschylus!" Years have shown that Yeats's appreciation was not as exaggerated as many might suppose.
But although Synge's poetry was not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to hisPoemshe wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and at the same time a classiccredofor all that we call the "new" poetry. "I have often thought," it begins, "that at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, using 'poetic' in the same special sense. The poetry of exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops.... Even if we grant that exaltedpoetry can be kept successfully by itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood."
New tendencies are contagious. But they also disclose themselves simultaneously in places and people where there has been no point of contact. Even before Synge published his proofs of the keen poetry in everyday life, Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggishness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before him. An obscure Anglo-Indian journalist, the publication of hisBarrack-room Balladsin 1892 brought him sudden notice. By 1895 he was internationally famous. Brushing over the pallid attempts to revive a pallid past, he rode triumphantly on a wave of buoyant and sometimes brutal joy in the present. Kipling gloried in the material world; he did more—he glorified it. He pierced the coarse exteriors of seemingly prosaic things—things like machinery, bridge-building, cockney soldiers, slang, steam, the dirty by-products of science (witness "M'Andrews Hymn" and "The Bell Buoy")—and uncovered their hidden glamour. "Romance is gone," sighed most of his contemporaries,
"... and all unseenRomance brought up the nine-fifteen."
"... and all unseenRomance brought up the nine-fifteen."
That sentence (from his poem "The King") contains the key to the manner in which the author ofThe Five Nationshelped to rejuvenate English verse.
Kipling, with his perception of ordinary people in terms of ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of vigor, beginning with Masefield. There are occasional and serious defects in Kipling's work—particularly in his more facile poetry; he falls into a journalistic ease that tends to turn into jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to the place of the universal.
All art is a twofold revivifying—a recreation of subject and a reanimating of form. And poetry becomes perennially "new" by returning to the old—with a different consciousness, a greater awareness. In 1911, when art was again searching for novelty, John Masefield created something startling and new by going back to 1385 andThe Canterbury Pilgrims. Employing both the Chaucerian model and a form similar to the practically forgotten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote in rapid succession,The Everlasting Mercy(1911),The Widow in the Bye Street(1912),Dauber(1912),The Daffodil Fields(1913)—four astonishing rhymed narratives and fourof the most remarkable poems of our generation. Expressive of every rugged phase of life, these poems, uniting old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclamation that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry also ... and it may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must be brutal."
Masefield brought back to poetry that mixture of beauty and brutality which is its most human and enduring quality. He brought back that rich and almost vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine—and of all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world—or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (inThe Everlasting Mercy) or the story ofDauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and a dreaming youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous description of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly done, a masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes are quieter in tone, more measured in technique; there is an almost religious ring to many of his Shakespearian sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a passionate strength that leaps through all his work fromSalt Water Ballads(1902) toReynard the Fox(1919).
There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation between Masefield and the younger men. Although several of them owe much to him, most of the younger poets speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning from his first preoccupation with shining knights, faultless queens, ladies in distress and all the paraphernalia of hackneyed mediæval romances, to write about ferrymen, berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers, circus-men, carpenters—dramatizing (though sometimes theatricalizing) the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary people inLivelihood,Daily BreadandFires. This intensity had been asking new questions. It found its answers in the war; repressed emotionalism discovered a new outlet. One hears its echoes in the younger poets like Siegfried Sassoon, with his poignant and unsparing poems of conflict; in Robert Graves, who reflects it in a lighter and more fantastic vein; in James Stephens, whose wild ingenuities are redolent of the soil. And it finds its corresponding opposite in the limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson; in the ghostly magic and the nursery-rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare; in the quiet and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies. Among the others, the brilliant G. K. Chesterton, the facile Alfred Noyes, the romantic Rupert Brooke (who owes less to Masefield and his immediate predecessors than he does to the passionately intellectual Donne), the introspective D. H. Lawrence and the versatile J. C.Squire, are perhaps best known to American readers.
All of the poets mentioned in the foregoing paragraph (with the exception of Noyes) have formed themselves in a loose group called "The Georgians," and an anthology of their best work has appeared every two years since 1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater are also listed among the Georgian poets. When their first collection appeared in March, 1913, Henry Newbolt, a critic as well as poet, wrote: "These younger poets have no temptation to be false. They are not for making something 'pretty,' something up to the standard of professional patterns.... They write as grown men walk, each with his own unconscious stride and gesture.... In short, they express themselves and seem to steer without an effort between the dangers of innovation and reminiscence." The secret of this success, and for that matter, the success of the greater portion of English poetry, is not an exclusive discovery of the Georgian poets. It is their inheritance, derived from those predecessors who, "from Wordsworth and Coleridge onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse to the manner and accent of natural speech." In its adaptability no less than in its vigor, modern English poetry is true to its period—and its past.
This collection is obviously a companion volume toModern American Poetry, which, in its restricted compass, attempted to act as an introduction to recent native verse.Modern British Poetrycovers the same period (from about 1870 to 1920), follows the same chronological scheme, but it is more amplified and goes into far greater detail than its predecessor.
The two volumes, considered together, furnish interesting contrasts; they reveal certain similarities and certain strange differences. Broadly speaking, modern American verse is sharp, vigorously experimental; full of youth and its occasional—and natural—crudities. English verse is smoother, more matured and, molded by centuries of literature, richer in associations and surer in artistry. Where the American output is often rude, extremely varied and uncoördinated (being the expression of partly indigenous, partly naturalized and largely unassimilated ideas, emotions, and races), the English product is formulated, precise and, in spite of its fluctuations, true to its past. It goes back to traditions as old as Chaucer (witness the narratives of Masefield and Gibson) or tendencies as classic as Drayton, Herrick and Blake—as in the frank lyrics of A. E. Housman, the artless lyricism of Ralph Hodgson, the naïf wonder of W. H. Davies. And if English poetry may be compared to a broad and luxuriating river (while American poetry might be described as a sudden rush of unconnected mountain torrents, valley streams and city sluices), it will be inspiring to observe how its course has been temporarily deflected in the last forty years; how it has swung away from one tendency toward another; and how, for all its bends and twists, it has lost neither its strength nor its nobility.
L. U.
New York City.January, 1920.
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, and has for years been famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer of intense and sombre novels. HisTess of the D'UrbervillesandJude the Obscureare possibly his best known, although hisWessex TalesandLife's Little Ironiesare no less imposing.
It was not until he was almost sixty, in 1898 to be precise, that Hardy abandoned prose and challenged attention as a poet.The Dynasts, a drama of the Napoleonic Wars, is in three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes, a massive and most amazing contribution to contemporary art. It is the apotheosis of Hardy the novelist. Lascelles Abercrombie calls this work, which is partly a historical play, partly a visionary drama, "the biggest and most consistent exhibition of fatalism in literature." While its powerful simplicity and tragic impressiveness overshadow his shorter poems, many of his terse lyrics reveal the same vigor and impact of a strong personality. His collected poems were published by The Macmillan Company in 1919 and reveal another phase of one of the greatest living writers of English.
Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walk,With an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch grass:Yet this will go onward the sameThough Dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wightCome whispering by;War's annals will fade into nightEre their story die.
Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walk,With an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch grass:Yet this will go onward the sameThough Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wightCome whispering by;War's annals will fade into nightEre their story die.
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,The sparkles where the brook was flowing,Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,—These were the things we wished would stay;But they were going.Seasons of blankness as of snow,The silent bleed of a world decaying,The moan of multitudes in woe,—These were the things we wished would go;But they were staying.
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,The sparkles where the brook was flowing,Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,—These were the things we wished would stay;But they were going.
Seasons of blankness as of snow,The silent bleed of a world decaying,The moan of multitudes in woe,—These were the things we wished would go;But they were staying.
"Had he and I but metBy some old ancient inn,We should have sat us down to wetRight many a nipperkin!"But ranged as infantry,And staring face to face,I shot at him as he at me,And killed him in his place."I shot him dead because—Because he was my foe,Just so: my foe of course he was;That's clear enough; although"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,Off-hand like—just as I—Was out of work—had sold his traps—No other reason why."Yes; quaint and curious war is!You shoot a fellow downYou'd treat, if met where any bar is,Or help to half-a-crown."
"Had he and I but metBy some old ancient inn,We should have sat us down to wetRight many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,And staring face to face,I shot at him as he at me,And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because—Because he was my foe,Just so: my foe of course he was;That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,Off-hand like—just as I—Was out of work—had sold his traps—No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!You shoot a fellow downYou'd treat, if met where any bar is,Or help to half-a-crown."
Robert Bridges was born in 1844 and educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After traveling extensively, he studied medicine in London and practiced until 1882. Most of his poems, like his occasional plays, are classical in tone as well as treatment. He was appointed poet laureate in 1913, following Alfred Austin. His command of the secrets of rhythm and a subtle versification give his lines a firm delicacy and beauty of pattern.
The day begins to droop,—Its course is done:But nothing tells the placeOf the setting sun.The hazy darkness deepens,And up the laneYou may hear, but cannot see,The homing wain.An engine pants and humsIn the farm hard by:Its lowering smoke is lostIn the lowering sky.The soaking branches drip,And all night throughThe dropping will not ceaseIn the avenue.A tall man there in the houseMust keep his chair:He knows he will never againBreathe the spring air:His heart is worn with work;He is giddy and sickIf he rise to go as farAs the nearest rick:He thinks of his morn of life,His hale, strong years;And braves as he may the nightOf darkness and tears.
The day begins to droop,—Its course is done:But nothing tells the placeOf the setting sun.
The hazy darkness deepens,And up the laneYou may hear, but cannot see,The homing wain.
An engine pants and humsIn the farm hard by:Its lowering smoke is lostIn the lowering sky.
The soaking branches drip,And all night throughThe dropping will not ceaseIn the avenue.
A tall man there in the houseMust keep his chair:He knows he will never againBreathe the spring air:
His heart is worn with work;He is giddy and sickIf he rise to go as farAs the nearest rick:
He thinks of his morn of life,His hale, strong years;And braves as he may the nightOf darkness and tears.
Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefromYe learn your song:Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,Among the flowers, which in that heavenly airBloom the year long!Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,A throe of the heart,Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,For all our art.Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of menWe pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,As night is withdrawnFrom these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,Dream, while the innumerable choir of dayWelcome the dawn.
Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefromYe learn your song:Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,Among the flowers, which in that heavenly airBloom the year long!
Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,A throe of the heart,Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,For all our art.
Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of menWe pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,As night is withdrawnFrom these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,Dream, while the innumerable choir of dayWelcome the dawn.
The Irish-English singer, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, was born in London in 1844. He was connected, for a while, with the British Museum, and was transferred later to the Department of Natural History. His first literary success,Epic of Women(1870), promised a brilliant future for the young poet, a promise strengthened by hisMusic and Moonlight(1874). Always delicate in health, his hopes were dashed by periods of illness and an early death in London in 1881.
The poem here reprinted is not only O'Shaughnessy's best, but is, because of its perfect blending of music and message, one of the immortal classics of our verse.
We are the music-makers,And we are the dreamers of dreams,Wandering by lone sea-breakers,And sitting by desolate streams;World-losers and world-forsakers,On whom the pale moon gleams:Yet we are the movers and shakersOf the world for ever, it seems.With wonderful deathless dittiesWe build up the world's great cities,And out of a fabulous storyWe fashion an empire's glory:One man with a dream, at pleasure,Shall go forth and conquer a crown;And three with a new song's measureCan trample an empire down.We, in the ages lyingIn the buried past of the earth,Built Nineveh with our sighing,And Babel itself with our mirth;And o'erthrew them with prophesyingTo the old of the new world's worth;For each age is a dream that is dying,Or one that is coming to birth.
We are the music-makers,And we are the dreamers of dreams,Wandering by lone sea-breakers,And sitting by desolate streams;World-losers and world-forsakers,On whom the pale moon gleams:Yet we are the movers and shakersOf the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless dittiesWe build up the world's great cities,And out of a fabulous storyWe fashion an empire's glory:One man with a dream, at pleasure,Shall go forth and conquer a crown;And three with a new song's measureCan trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lyingIn the buried past of the earth,Built Nineveh with our sighing,And Babel itself with our mirth;And o'erthrew them with prophesyingTo the old of the new world's worth;For each age is a dream that is dying,Or one that is coming to birth.
William Ernest Henley was born in 1849 and was educated at the Grammar School of Gloucester. From childhood he was afflicted with a tuberculous disease which finally necessitated the amputation of a foot. HisHospital Verses, those vivid precursors of current free verse, were a record of the time when he was at the infirmary at Edinburgh; they are sharp with the sights, sensations, even the actual smells of the sickroom. In spite (or, more probably, because) of his continued poor health, Henley never ceased to worship strength and energy; courage and a triumphant belief in a harsh world shine out of the athleticLondon Voluntaries(1892) and the lightest and most musical lyrics inHawthorn and Lavender(1898).
The bulk of Henley's poetry is not great in volume. He has himself explained the small quantity of his work in a Preface to hisPoems, first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1898. "A principal reason," he says, "is that, after spending the better part of my life in the pursuit of poetry, I found myself (about 1877) so utterly unmarketable that I had to own myself beaten in art, and to indict myself to journalism for the next ten years." Later on, he began to write again—"old dusty sheaves were dragged to light; the work of selection and correction was begun; I burned much; I found that, after all, the lyrical instinct had slept—not died."
After a brilliant and varied career (see Preface), devoted mostly to journalism, Henley died in 1903.
Out of the night that covers me,Black as the Pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed.Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of the shade,And yet the menace of the yearsFinds, and shall find, me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.
Out of the night that covers me,Black as the Pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of the shade,And yet the menace of the yearsFinds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.
The nightingale has a lyre of gold,The lark's is a clarion call,And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,But I love him best of all.For his song is all of the joy of life,And we in the mad, spring weather,We two have listened till he sangOur hearts and lips together.
The nightingale has a lyre of gold,The lark's is a clarion call,And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,But I love him best of all.
For his song is all of the joy of life,And we in the mad, spring weather,We two have listened till he sangOur hearts and lips together.
It was a bowl of roses:There in the light they lay,Languishing, glorying, glowingTheir life away.And the soul of them rose like a presence,Into me crept and grew,And filled me with something—some one—O, was it you?
It was a bowl of roses:There in the light they lay,Languishing, glorying, glowingTheir life away.
And the soul of them rose like a presence,Into me crept and grew,And filled me with something—some one—O, was it you?
Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.A little while, and at a leap I stormThe thick sweet mystery of chloroform,The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.The gods are good to me: I have no wife,No innocent child, to think of as I nearThe fateful minute; nothing all-too dearUnmans me for my bout of passive strife.Yet I am tremulous and a trifle sick,And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little:My hopes are strong, my will is something weak.Here comes the basket? Thank you. I am readyBut, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle:You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—Steady!
Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.A little while, and at a leap I stormThe thick sweet mystery of chloroform,The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.The gods are good to me: I have no wife,No innocent child, to think of as I nearThe fateful minute; nothing all-too dearUnmans me for my bout of passive strife.
Yet I am tremulous and a trifle sick,And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little:My hopes are strong, my will is something weak.Here comes the basket? Thank you. I am readyBut, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle:You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—Steady!
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;And from the west,Where the sun, his day's work ended,Lingers as in content,There falls on the old, grey cityAn influence luminous and serene,A shining peace.The smoke ascendsIn a rosy-and-golden haze. The spiresShine, and are changed. In the valleyShadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,Closing his benediction,Sinks, and the darkening airThrills with a sense of the triumphing night—Night with her train of starsAnd her great gift of sleep.So be my passing!My task accomplished and the long day done,My wages taken, and in my heartSome late lark singing,Let me be gathered to the quiet west,The sundown splendid and serene,Death.
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;And from the west,Where the sun, his day's work ended,Lingers as in content,There falls on the old, grey cityAn influence luminous and serene,A shining peace.
The smoke ascendsIn a rosy-and-golden haze. The spiresShine, and are changed. In the valleyShadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,Closing his benediction,Sinks, and the darkening airThrills with a sense of the triumphing night—Night with her train of starsAnd her great gift of sleep.
So be my passing!My task accomplished and the long day done,My wages taken, and in my heartSome late lark singing,Let me be gathered to the quiet west,The sundown splendid and serene,Death.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in 1850. He was at first trained to be a lighthouse engineer, following the profession of his family. However, he studied law instead; was admitted to the bar in 1875; and abandoned law for literature a few years later.
Though primarily a novelist, Stevenson has left one immortal book of poetry which is equally at home in the nursery and the library:A Child's Garden of Verses(first published in 1885) is second only to Mother Goose's own collection in its lyrical simplicity and universal appeal.Underwoods(1887) andBallads(1890) comprise his entire poetic output. As a genial essayist, he is not unworthy to be ranked with Charles Lamb. As a romancer, his fame rests securely onKidnapped, the unfinished masterpiece,Weir of Hermiston, and that eternal classic of youth,Treasure Island.
Stevenson died after a long and dogged fight with his illness, in the Samoan Islands in 1894.
Great is the sun, and wide he goesThrough empty heaven without repose;And in the blue and glowing daysMore thick than rain he showers his rays.Though closer still the blinds we pullTo keep the shady parlour cool,Yet he will find a chink or twoTo slip his golden fingers through.The dusty attic, spider-clad,He, through the keyhole, maketh glad;And through the broken edge of tilesInto the laddered hay-loft smiles.Meantime his golden face aroundHe bares to all the garden ground,And sheds a warm and glittering lookAmong the ivy's inmost nook.Above the hills, along the blue,Round the bright air with footing true,To please the child, to paint the rose,The gardener of the World, he goes.
Great is the sun, and wide he goesThrough empty heaven without repose;And in the blue and glowing daysMore thick than rain he showers his rays.
Though closer still the blinds we pullTo keep the shady parlour cool,Yet he will find a chink or twoTo slip his golden fingers through.
The dusty attic, spider-clad,He, through the keyhole, maketh glad;And through the broken edge of tilesInto the laddered hay-loft smiles.
Meantime his golden face aroundHe bares to all the garden ground,And sheds a warm and glittering lookAmong the ivy's inmost nook.
Above the hills, along the blue,Round the bright air with footing true,To please the child, to paint the rose,The gardener of the World, he goes.
Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;Blinks but an hour or two; and then,A blood-red orange, sets again.Before the stars have left the skies,At morning in the dark I rise;And shivering in my nakedness,By the cold candle, bathe and dress.Close by the jolly fire I sitTo warm my frozen bones a bit;Or with a reindeer-sled, exploreThe colder countries round the door.When to go out, my nurse doth wrapMe in my comforter and cap;The cold wind burns my face, and blowsIts frosty pepper up my nose.Black are my steps on silver sod;Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;And tree and house, and hill and lake,Are frosted like a wedding-cake.
Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;Blinks but an hour or two; and then,A blood-red orange, sets again.
Before the stars have left the skies,At morning in the dark I rise;And shivering in my nakedness,By the cold candle, bathe and dress.
Close by the jolly fire I sitTo warm my frozen bones a bit;Or with a reindeer-sled, exploreThe colder countries round the door.
When to go out, my nurse doth wrapMe in my comforter and cap;The cold wind burns my face, and blowsIts frosty pepper up my nose.
Black are my steps on silver sod;Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;And tree and house, and hill and lake,Are frosted like a wedding-cake.
I will make you brooches and toys for your delightOf bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.I will make a palace fit for you and me,Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room,Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom,And you shall wash your linen and keep your body whiteIn rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.And this shall be for music when no one else is near,The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!That only I remember, that only you admire,Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.
I will make you brooches and toys for your delightOf bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.I will make a palace fit for you and me,Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room,Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom,And you shall wash your linen and keep your body whiteIn rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!That only I remember, that only you admire,Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.
Under the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you 'grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,And the hunter home from the hill.
Under the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,And the hunter home from the hill.
Alice Meynell was born in London in 1850. She was educated at home and spent a great part of her childhood in Italy. She has written little, but that little is on an extremely high plane; her verses are simple, pensive and always distinguished. The best of her work is inPoems(1903).
A voice peals in this end of nightA phrase of notes resembling stars,Single and spiritual notes of light.What call they at my window-bars?The South, the past, the day to be,An ancient infelicity.Darkling, deliberate, what singsThis wonderful one, alone, at peace?What wilder things than song, what thingsSweeter than youth, clearer than Greece,Dearer than Italy, untoldDelight, and freshness centuries old?And first first-loves, a multitude,The exaltation of their pain;Ancestral childhood long renewed;And midnights of invisible rain;And gardens, gardens, night and day,Gardens and childhood all the way.What Middle Ages passionate,O passionless voice! What distant bellsLodged in the hills, what palace stateIllyrian! For it speaks, it tells,Without desire, without dismay,Some morrow and some yesterday.All-natural things! But more—Whence cameThis yet remoter mystery?How do these starry notes proclaimA graver still divinity?This hope, this sanctity of fear?O innocent throat! O human ear!
A voice peals in this end of nightA phrase of notes resembling stars,Single and spiritual notes of light.What call they at my window-bars?The South, the past, the day to be,An ancient infelicity.
Darkling, deliberate, what singsThis wonderful one, alone, at peace?What wilder things than song, what thingsSweeter than youth, clearer than Greece,Dearer than Italy, untoldDelight, and freshness centuries old?
And first first-loves, a multitude,The exaltation of their pain;Ancestral childhood long renewed;And midnights of invisible rain;And gardens, gardens, night and day,Gardens and childhood all the way.
What Middle Ages passionate,O passionless voice! What distant bellsLodged in the hills, what palace stateIllyrian! For it speaks, it tells,Without desire, without dismay,Some morrow and some yesterday.
All-natural things! But more—Whence cameThis yet remoter mystery?How do these starry notes proclaimA graver still divinity?This hope, this sanctity of fear?O innocent throat! O human ear!
William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 1855. He wrote several volumes of biography and criticism, published a book of plays greatly influenced by Maeterlinck (Vistas) and was editor of "The Canterbury Poets" series.
His femininealter ego, Fiona Macleod, was a far different personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of another spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote several volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and no little unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona Macleod, the most barbaric and vivid are those collected inThe Sin-Eater and Other Tales; the longerPharais, A Romance of the Isles, is scarcely less unique.
In the ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896From the Hills of Dreamappeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod;The Hour of Beauty, an even more distinctive collection, followed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellectual and, it must be admitted the more arresting, was that of William Sharp.
He died in 1905.
In the secret Valley of SilenceNo breath doth fall;No wind stirs in the branches;No bird doth call:As on a white wallA breathless lizard is still,So silence lies on the valleyBreathlessly still.In the dusk-grown heart of the valleyAn altar rises white:No rapt priest bends in aweBefore its silent light:But sometimes a flightOf breathless words of prayerWhite-wing'd enclose the altar,Eddies of prayer.
In the secret Valley of SilenceNo breath doth fall;No wind stirs in the branches;No bird doth call:As on a white wallA breathless lizard is still,So silence lies on the valleyBreathlessly still.
In the dusk-grown heart of the valleyAn altar rises white:No rapt priest bends in aweBefore its silent light:But sometimes a flightOf breathless words of prayerWhite-wing'd enclose the altar,Eddies of prayer.
In a fair placeOf whin and grass,I heard feet passWhere no one was.I saw a faceBloom like a flower—Nay, as the rainbow-showerOf a tempestuous hour.It was not man, or woman:It was not human:But, beautiful and wild,Terribly undefiled,I knew an unborn child.
In a fair placeOf whin and grass,I heard feet passWhere no one was.
I saw a faceBloom like a flower—Nay, as the rainbow-showerOf a tempestuous hour.
It was not man, or woman:It was not human:But, beautiful and wild,Terribly undefiled,I knew an unborn child.
Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant career. When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won the Newdigate Prize with his poemRavenna.
Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such asAn Ideal HusbandandThe Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an æsthete. (See Preface.)
Most of his poems in prose (such asThe Happy Prince,The Birthday of the InfantaandThe Fisherman and His Soul) are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse; but in one long poem,The Ballad of Reading Gaol(1898), he sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only producedThe Ballad of Reading Gaolbut made possible his most poignant piece of writing,De Profundis, only a small part of which has been published.Salomé, which has made the author's name a household word, was originally written in French in 1892 and later translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas, accompanied by the famous illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. More recently this heated drama, based on the story of Herod and Herodias, was made into an opera by Richard Strauss.
Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the forerunners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching ironies. One sees the origin of a whole school of drama in such epigrams as "The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts." Or "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900.