Some one is always sitting there,In the little green orchard;.....When you are most alone,All but the silence gone ...Some one is waiting and watching there,In the little green orchard.
Some one is always sitting there,In the little green orchard;
.....
When you are most alone,All but the silence gone ...Some one is waiting and watching there,In the little green orchard.
Flowers grow in the sunny spaces, and all the wildthings that children love—primrose and pimpernel, darnel and thorn;
Teasle and tansy, meadowsweet,Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;Clover, burnet, and thyme....
Teasle and tansy, meadowsweet,Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;Clover, burnet, and thyme....
It is mostly a shadowy place however, not chill and gloomy, but arched with slender trees, through whose thin leafage slant the warm fingers of the sun, picking out clear, quickly-moving patterns upon the grass. The air is soft, the light is as mellow as a harvest moon, and the sounds of the outer world are subdued almost to silence. Nothing loud or strenuous disturbs the tranquility: only the remote voices of happy children and friendly beasts and kind old people. Wonder lives here, but not fear; smiles but not laughter; tenderness but not passion. And the presiding genius of the spot is the poet's "Sleeping Cupid," sitting in the shade with his bare feet deep in the grass and the dew slowly gathering upon his curls: a cool and lovesome elf, softly dreaming of beauty in a quiet place.
So one might try to catch into tangible shape the spirit of this poetry, only to realize the impossibility of doing anything of the kind. But mere analysis would be equally futile; for the essence of it is assubtle as air and as fluid as light; and one is finally compelled, in the hope of conveying some impression of the nature of it, to fall back upon comparison. It is a clumsy method however, frequently doing violence to one or both of the poets compared; and even when used discreetly, it often serves only to indicate a more or less obvious point of resemblance. But we must take the risk of that for the moment, and call out of memory the magical effect that is produced upon the mind by the reading of "Kubla Khan," or "Christabel" or "The Ancient Mariner." Very similar to that is the effect of Mr. de la Mare's poetry. There is a difference, and its implications are important; but the chief fact is that here, amongst this modern poetry of so different an order, you find work which seems like a lovely survival from the age of romance.
That is why one has the feeling that this poet has never grown up. Partly from a natural inclination, and partly from a deliberate plan (like that of Coleridge) to produce a certain kind of art, he has created a faëry, twilight world, a world of wonder and fantasy, which is the home of perpetual youth. He has never really lost that time when, as a little boy, he says that he listened to Martha telling her stories in the hazel glen. Martha, of 'the clear grey eyes' and the 'grave, small,lovely head' is surely a veritable handmaid of romance:
'Once ... once upon a time ...'Like a dream you dream in the night,Fairies and gnomes stole outIn the leaf-green light.And her beauty far awayWould fade, as her voice ran on,Till hazel and summer sunAnd all were gone:—All fordone and forgot;And like clouds in the height of the sky,Our hearts stood still in the hushOf an age gone by.
'Once ... once upon a time ...'Like a dream you dream in the night,Fairies and gnomes stole outIn the leaf-green light.
And her beauty far awayWould fade, as her voice ran on,Till hazel and summer sunAnd all were gone:—
All fordone and forgot;And like clouds in the height of the sky,Our hearts stood still in the hushOf an age gone by.
That hush, invoking a sense of remoteness in space and time, lies over all his work. It is as though, walking in the garden of this verse, a child flitted lightly before us with a finger raised in a gesture of silence. And it is not for nothing that his principal book is calledThe Listeners. Footfalls are light, and voices soft, and the wind is gentle: the noise of life is filtered to a whisper or a rustle or a sleepy murmur. It is a device, of course, as we quickly see if we peer too curiously at it: just a contrivance of the romantic artist to create 'atmosphere.' But it is so cunningly done that you never suspectthe contriving; and if you would gauge the skill of the poet in this direction, you should note that he is able to produce the desired effect in the broad light of day as well as in shadow and twilight. It is a more difficult achievement, and much rarer. Evening is the time that the poets generally choose to work this particular spell: though moonlight or starlight, dawn, sunset, and almost any degree of darkness will serve them. Sunlight alone, wide-eyed, penetrating and inquisitive, is inimical to their purpose. Yet Mr de la Mare, in a poem called "The Sleeper," succeeds in spinning this hush of wondering awe out of the full light of a summer day. A little girl (Ann, a charming and familiar figure in this poetry: at once a symbol of childhood and a very human child) runs into the house to her mother, and finds her asleep in her chair. That is all the 'plot'; and it would be hard to find an incident slighter, simpler and more commonplace. But out of this homespun material the poet has somehow conjured an eerie, brooding, impalpable presence which steals upon us as it does upon the child in the quiet house until, like her, we want to creep quickly out again.
A sense of the supernatural, that constant component of the romantic temperament, is of the essence of this poetry. The manifestation of it issomething more than a trick of technique, for it has its origin in the very nature of the poet's genius. In its simpler and more direct expression, it seems to spring out of the fearful joy which this type of mind experiences in contact with the strange and weird. Again, as in "The Witch," it may take the form of a bit of pure fantasy, transmitting the fascination which has already seized the poet with a lurking smile at its own absurdity. The opening stanzas tell of a tired old witch who sits down to rest by a churchyard wall; and who, in jerking off her pack of charms, breaks the cord and spills them all out on the ground:
And out the dead came stumbling,From every rift and crack,Silent as moss, and plunderedThe gaping pack.They wish them, three times over,Away they skip full soon:Bat and Mole and Leveret,Under the rising moon.Owl and Newt and Nightjar:They take their shapes and creep,Silent as churchyard lichen,While she squats asleep......Names may be writ; and mounds rise;Purporting, Here be bones:But empty is that churchyardOf all save stones.Owl and Newt and Nightjar,Leveret, Bat and MoleHaunt and call in the twilight,Where she slept, poor soul.
And out the dead came stumbling,From every rift and crack,Silent as moss, and plunderedThe gaping pack.
They wish them, three times over,Away they skip full soon:Bat and Mole and Leveret,Under the rising moon.
Owl and Newt and Nightjar:They take their shapes and creep,Silent as churchyard lichen,While she squats asleep.
.....
Names may be writ; and mounds rise;Purporting, Here be bones:But empty is that churchyardOf all save stones.
Owl and Newt and Nightjar,Leveret, Bat and MoleHaunt and call in the twilight,Where she slept, poor soul.
But in its subtler forms the supernatural element of this poetry is more complex and more potent. And it would seem to have a definite relation to the poet's philosophy. Not that it is possible to trace an outline of systematic thought in work like this, where every constituent is milled and sifted to exquisite fineness and fused to perfect unity. But if we follow up a hint here and there, and correlate them with the author's prose fiction, we shall not be able to escape the suggestion of a mystical basis to the elusive witchery of so many of his poems. We shall see it to be rooted in an extreme sensitiveness to what are called 'psychic' influences: a sensitiveness through which he becomes, at one end of the scale, acutely aware of the presence of a surrounding spirit world; and at the other, deeply sympathetic and tender to subhuman creatures.
No crude claim is made on behalf of any mysticalcreed; and still less would one violate the fragile and mysterious charm of a poem like "The Listeners" by so-called interpretation. But placed beside "The Witch," it is clearly seen to treat the supernatural on a higher plane: it is, indeed, a piece of rare and delicate symbolism. There is no recourse to the ready appeal of the grotesque and the marvellous; and although we find here all the 'machinery' of a sensational poem in the older romantic manner—the great empty house standing lonely in the forest, moonlight and silence, and a traveller knocking unheeded at the door—it is a very subtle blending of those elements which has gone to produce the peculiar effect of this piece. Twice the traveller knocks, crying: "Is there anybody there?" but no answer comes:
... only a host of phantom listenersThat dwelt in the lone house thenStood listening in the quiet of the moonlightTo that voice from the world of men:Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,That goes down to the empty hall,Hearkening in an air stirred and shakenBy the lonely Traveller's call.And he felt in his heart their strangeness,Their stillness answering his cry,While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,'Neath the starred and leafy sky;For he suddenly smote on the door, evenLouder, and lifted his head:—'Tell them I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word,' he said.
... only a host of phantom listenersThat dwelt in the lone house thenStood listening in the quiet of the moonlightTo that voice from the world of men:Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,That goes down to the empty hall,Hearkening in an air stirred and shakenBy the lonely Traveller's call.And he felt in his heart their strangeness,Their stillness answering his cry,While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,'Neath the starred and leafy sky;For he suddenly smote on the door, evenLouder, and lifted his head:—'Tell them I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word,' he said.
Running through the piece—and more clearly perceived when the whole poem is read—is the thread of melancholy which is inseparably woven into all the poet's work of this kind. And it, too, was a gift of his fairy-godmother when he was born, light in texture as a gossamer and spun out of the softest silk. Melancholy is almost too big a word to fit the thing it is, for there is no gloom in it. It is like the silvery, transparent cloud of thoughtfulness which passes for a moment over a happy face; and it has something of the youthful trick of playing with the idea of sadness. Hence come the early studies of "Imogen" and "Ophelia," where the poet is so much in love with mournfulness that he revels in making perfect phrases about it.
Can death haunt silence with a silver sound?Can death, that hushes all music to a close,Pluck one sweet wire scarce-audible that trembles,As if a little child, called Purity,Sang heedlessly on of his dear Imogen?
Can death haunt silence with a silver sound?Can death, that hushes all music to a close,Pluck one sweet wire scarce-audible that trembles,As if a little child, called Purity,Sang heedlessly on of his dear Imogen?
But even when this verse approaches a degree nearer to the reality of pain it is still, as it were, a reflected emotion; and there is no poignance init. It is a winning echo of sorrowfulness, caught by one who has the habit of turning back to listen and look. Thus the studies of old age which we sometimes find here are drawn in the true romantic manner, with a sunset halo about them, and lightly shadowed by wistfulness and faint regret. And the thought of death, when it is allowed to enter, comes as caressingly as sleep. The little poem called "All That's Past," where the poet is thinking of how far down the roots of all things go, is only one example of many where melancholy is toned to the faintest strain of pensive sweetness:
Very old are the woods;And the buds that breakOut of the briar's boughs,When March winds wake,So old with their beauty are—Oh, no man knowsThrough what wild centuriesRoves back the rose......Very old are we men;Our dreams are talesTold in dim EdenBy Eve's nightingales;We walk and whisper awhile,But, the day gone by,Silence and sleep like fieldsOf amaranth lie.
Very old are the woods;And the buds that breakOut of the briar's boughs,When March winds wake,So old with their beauty are—Oh, no man knowsThrough what wild centuriesRoves back the rose.
.....
Very old are we men;Our dreams are talesTold in dim EdenBy Eve's nightingales;We walk and whisper awhile,But, the day gone by,Silence and sleep like fieldsOf amaranth lie.
So we might continue to cull passages which represent one aspect or another of the specific quality of Mr de la Mare's poetry. The choice is embarrassingly rich, for there is remarkable unity of tone and technical perfection here. But there is a danger in the process, especially with work of so fine a grain; and one feels bound to repeat the warning that it is impossible to dissect its ultimate essence in this way. We can only come back to our comparison, and recalling the magical music of poems like "Arabia," "Queen Djenira," or "Voices"—in which all the characteristics noted are so intimately blended that it is impossible to disengage them—reiterate the fact that they possess the same inexplicable charm as the romantic work of Coleridge.
But that reminds us of the difference, and all that it implies. For, after all, this poet is a romanticist of the twentieth century, and not of the late eighteenth. It is true that his genius has surprisingly kept its youth (even more, that is to say, than the poet usually does); but it is a nonage which is clearly of this time and no other. The signs of this are clear enough. First and foremost, there is his humanity—in which perhaps all the others are included, and with which are certainly associated the simplicity and sincerity of his diction. It is as though the two famous principles on whichtheLyrical Balladswere planned had in the fulness of time become united in the creative impulse of a single mind. That is not to charge Mr de la Mare with the combined weight of those two earlier giants, of course, but simply to observe the truth which Rupert Brooke expressed so finely when he said that the poetic spirit was coming back "to its wider home, the human heart." So that even a born romanticist like this cannot escape; and into the chilly enchantment of an older manner warm sunlight streams and fresh airs blow.
Obvious links with the life-movement of his time are not lacking, though as mere external evidence they are relatively unimportant. Of such are the synthesis of poetry and science in "The Happy Encounter"; and the detachment suggested in "Keep Innocency," where the poet reveals a full consciousness of the gulf between romance and reality. But the influence goes deeper than that. It is because he is a child of his age that he has observed children so lovingly, and has wrought child-psychology into his verse with such wonderful accuracy. That also is why he calls so gently out of 'thin-strewn memory' such a homely figure as the shy old maid in her old-fashioned parlour; and thence, too, comes the sympathy with toiling folk—considering them characteristically in the serene mood when theirwork is done—which underlies such pieces as "Old Susan" and "Old Ben":
Sad is old Ben Thistlewaite,Now his day is done,And all his childrenFar away are gone.He sits beneath his jasmined porch,His stick between his knees,His eyes fixed vacantOn his moss-grown trees......But as in pale high autumn skiesThe swallows float and play,His restless thoughts pass to and fro,But nowhere stay.Soft, on the morrow, they are gone;His garden then will beDenser and shadier and greener,Greener the moss-grown tree.
Sad is old Ben Thistlewaite,Now his day is done,And all his childrenFar away are gone.
He sits beneath his jasmined porch,His stick between his knees,His eyes fixed vacantOn his moss-grown trees.
.....
But as in pale high autumn skiesThe swallows float and play,His restless thoughts pass to and fro,But nowhere stay.
Soft, on the morrow, they are gone;His garden then will beDenser and shadier and greener,Greener the moss-grown tree.
From the same humane temper come the poet's kindly feeling for animals and his affectionate understanding of them. Over and over again its positive aspect finds expression, either quaint, comical or tender. And twice at least the negative side of it appears, coming as near to rage at the wanton destruction of animal life as so mellow and balanced a nature would ever get. It is a significantfact that at such moments he takes refuge in his humour—that humour, at once rich and delicate, which is perhaps the most precious quality of this poetry, and which, growing from a free and sympathetic contact with life, holds the scale counterpoised to a nicety against the glamorous romantic sense. Thus we have this scrap of verse, lightly throwing off a mood of disgust in whimsical idiom:
I can't abear a Butcher,I can't abide his meat,The ugliest shop of all is his,The ugliest in the street;Bakers' are warm, cobblers' dark,Chemists' burn watery lights;But oh, the sawdust butcher's shop,That ugliest of sights!
I can't abear a Butcher,I can't abide his meat,The ugliest shop of all is his,The ugliest in the street;Bakers' are warm, cobblers' dark,Chemists' burn watery lights;But oh, the sawdust butcher's shop,That ugliest of sights!
And thus in "Tit for Tat" we find this apostrophe to a certain Tom Noddy, just returning from a day of 'sport' with his gun over his shoulder:
Wonder I very much do, Tom Noddy,If ever, when you are a-roam,An Ogre from space will stoop a lean face,And lug you home:Lug you home over his fence, Tom Noddy,Of thorn-stocks nine yards high,With your bent knees strung round his old iron gunAnd your head dan-dangling by:And hang you up stiff on a hook, Tom Noddy,From a stone-cold pantry shelf,Whence your eyes will glare in an empty stare,Till you are cooked yourself!
Wonder I very much do, Tom Noddy,If ever, when you are a-roam,An Ogre from space will stoop a lean face,And lug you home:
Lug you home over his fence, Tom Noddy,Of thorn-stocks nine yards high,With your bent knees strung round his old iron gunAnd your head dan-dangling by:
And hang you up stiff on a hook, Tom Noddy,From a stone-cold pantry shelf,Whence your eyes will glare in an empty stare,Till you are cooked yourself!
The humour there, corresponding in degree to the indignation for which it is a veil, is relatively broad. There are many subtler forms of it, however, and one will be found in a charming piece which is apt to our present point. It is called "Nicholas Nye," and tells about an old donkey in an orchard. He is an unprepossessing creature, lame and worn-out: just a bit of animal jettison, thrown away here to end his days in peace. And the poet had a great friendship with him:
But a wonderful gumption was under his skin,And a clear calm light in his eye,And once in a while: he'd smile:—Would Nicholas Nye.Seem to be smiling at me, he would,From his bush in the corner, of may,—Bony and ownerless, widowed and worn,Knobble-kneed, lonely and grey;And over the grass would seem to pass'Neath the deep dark blue of the sky,Something much better than words between meAnd Nicholas Nye.
But a wonderful gumption was under his skin,And a clear calm light in his eye,And once in a while: he'd smile:—Would Nicholas Nye.
Seem to be smiling at me, he would,From his bush in the corner, of may,—Bony and ownerless, widowed and worn,Knobble-kneed, lonely and grey;And over the grass would seem to pass'Neath the deep dark blue of the sky,Something much better than words between meAnd Nicholas Nye.
There are a dozen books by this author, the work of about a dozen years. They began to appear in 1902; and they end, so far as the present survey is concerned, with poems that were published in the first half of 1914. They make a good pile, a considerable achievement in bulk alone; and when they are read in sequence, they are found to represent a growing period in the poet's mind and art which corresponds to, and epitomises, the transition stage out of which English poetry is just passing. That is to say, in addition to the growth that one would expect—the ripening and development which would seem to be a normal process—there has occurred an unexpected thing: a complete change of ideal, with steady and rapid progress in the new direction. So that if Mr. Gibson's later books were compared directly with the early ones, they might appear to be by an entirely different hand. PlaceUrlyn the Harper—which was first published—beside a late play calledWomenkindor a still more recent dramatic piece calledBloodybush Edge; and the contrast will be complete. On the one hand there is all the charm of romance, in material and in manner—but very little else. On the other hand there is nothing to which theword charm will strictly apply; an almost complete artistic austerity: but a profound and powerful study of human nature. On the one hand there is a dainty lyrical form appropriate to the theme: there are songs like this one, about the hopeless love of the minstrel for the young queen who is mated with an old harsh king:
I sang of lovers, and she praised my song,The while the King looked on her with cold eyes,And 'twixt them on the throne sat mailèd wrong.I sang of Launcelot and Guenevere,While in her face I saw old sorrows rise,And throned between them cowered naked Fear.I sang of Tristram and La Belle Isoud,And how they fled the anger of King MarkTo live and love, deep sheltered in a wood.Then bending low, she spake sad voiced and sweet,The while grey terror crouched between them stark,"Sing now of Aucassin and Nicolete."
I sang of lovers, and she praised my song,The while the King looked on her with cold eyes,And 'twixt them on the throne sat mailèd wrong.
I sang of Launcelot and Guenevere,While in her face I saw old sorrows rise,And throned between them cowered naked Fear.
I sang of Tristram and La Belle Isoud,And how they fled the anger of King MarkTo live and love, deep sheltered in a wood.
Then bending low, she spake sad voiced and sweet,The while grey terror crouched between them stark,"Sing now of Aucassin and Nicolete."
The later work cannot be so readily illustrated: it is at once subtler and stronger, and depends more upon the effect of the whole than upon any single part. But for the sake of the contrast we may wrest a short passage out of its setting inBloodybush Edge. A couple of tramps have met at night onthe Scottish border; one is a cockney Londoner, a bad lot with something sinister about him and a touch of mystery. He has just stumbled out of the heather on to the road, cursing the darkness and the loneliness of the moor. The other, a Border man to whom night is beautiful and the wild landscape a familiar friend, protests that it is not dark, that the sky is 'all alive with little stars':
Tramp.... Stars!Give me the lamps along the Old Kent Road;And I'm content to leave the stars to you.They're well enough; but hung a trifle highFor walking with clean boots. Now a lamp or so....Dick.If it's so fine and brave, the Old Kent Road,How is it you came to leave it?Tramp.... I'd my reasons ...But I was scared: the loneliness and all;The quietness, and the queer creepy noises;And something that I couldn't put a name to,A kind of feeling in my marrow-bones,As though the great black hills against the skyHad come alive about me in the night,And they were watching me; as though I stoodNaked, in a big room, with blind men sitting,Unseen, all round me, in the quiet darkness,That was not dark to them. And all the starsWere eyeing me; and whisperings in the heatherWere like cold water trickling down my spine:
Tramp.... Stars!Give me the lamps along the Old Kent Road;And I'm content to leave the stars to you.They're well enough; but hung a trifle highFor walking with clean boots. Now a lamp or so....
Dick.If it's so fine and brave, the Old Kent Road,How is it you came to leave it?
Tramp.... I'd my reasons ...But I was scared: the loneliness and all;The quietness, and the queer creepy noises;And something that I couldn't put a name to,A kind of feeling in my marrow-bones,As though the great black hills against the skyHad come alive about me in the night,And they were watching me; as though I stoodNaked, in a big room, with blind men sitting,Unseen, all round me, in the quiet darkness,That was not dark to them. And all the starsWere eyeing me; and whisperings in the heatherWere like cold water trickling down my spine:
Putting an early and a late book side by side in this way, the contrast is astonishing. And it is not an unfair method of comparison, because when the new ideal appears it strikes suddenly into the work, and sharply differentiates it at once from all that had been written before. Like the larger movement which it so aptly illustrates, the change is conscious, deliberate, and full of significance; and it is the cardinal fact in this author's poetical career. It marks the stage at which he came to grips with reality: when he brought his art into relation with life: when the making of poetic beauty as an end in itself could no longer content him; and the social conscience, already prompting contemporary thought, quickened in him too.
Humanity was the new ideal: humanity at bay and splendidly fighting. It appeared first in the two volumes of 1907 as dramatic studies from the lives of shepherd-folk. Four books had preceded these, in which the texture of the verse was woven of old romance and legend. Another book was yet to come,The Web of Life, in which the prettiness of that kind of romanticism would blossom into absolute beauty. But the new impulse grew from the date ofStonefolds; and when the first part ofDaily Breadappeared, the impulse had become a reasoned principle. In the poem which prefacesthat volume it comes alive, realizing itself and finding utterance in terms which express much more than an individual experience. I quote it for that reason. The immediate thought has dignity and the personal note is engaging. There is, too, peculiar interest in the clarity and precision with which it speaks, albeit unconsciously, for the changing spirit in English poetry. But the final measure of the poem is the touch of universality that is latent within it. For here we have the expression of not only a law of development by which the poet must be bound, and not only a poetical synthesis of the most important intellectual movement of this generation, but an experience through which every soul must pass, if and when it claims its birthright in the human family.
As one, at midnight, wakened by the callOf golden-plovers in their seaward flight,Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fallThrough tingling silence of the frosty night—Who lies and listens, till the last note fails,And then, in fancy, faring with the flockFar over slumbering hills and dreaming dales,Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock;And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drownedWithin the mightier music of the deep,No more remembers the sweet piping soundThat startled him from dull, undreaming sleep:So I, first waking from oblivion, heard,With heart that kindled to the call of song,The voice of young life, fluting like a bird,And echoed that light lilting; till, ere long,Lured onward by that happy, singing-flight,I caught the stormy summons of the sea,And dared the restless deeps that, day and night,Surge with the life-song of humanity.
As one, at midnight, wakened by the callOf golden-plovers in their seaward flight,Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fallThrough tingling silence of the frosty night—Who lies and listens, till the last note fails,And then, in fancy, faring with the flockFar over slumbering hills and dreaming dales,Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock;And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drownedWithin the mightier music of the deep,No more remembers the sweet piping soundThat startled him from dull, undreaming sleep:So I, first waking from oblivion, heard,With heart that kindled to the call of song,The voice of young life, fluting like a bird,And echoed that light lilting; till, ere long,Lured onward by that happy, singing-flight,I caught the stormy summons of the sea,And dared the restless deeps that, day and night,Surge with the life-song of humanity.
Being wise after the event, one can discover auguries of that change in the very early work. There is, for example, a group of little poems calledFaring South, studied directly from peasant life in the south of France. They indicate that even at that time an awakening sympathy with toiling folk had begun to guide his observation; and they are in any case a very different record of European travel from that of the mere poetaster. There are studies of a stonebreaker, a thresher, a ploughman; there is a veracious little picture of a housemother, returning home at the end of market-day laden, tired and dusty; but happy to be under her own vine-porch once more. And most interesting of all the group, there is a shepherd, the forerunner of robuster shepherds in later books, and evidently a figure which has for this author a special attraction.
With folded arms, against his staff he stands,Sun-soaking, rapt, within the August blazeThe while his sheep with moving rustle grazeThe lean, parched undergrowth of stubble lands.Indifferent 'neath the low blue-laden skyHe gazes fearless in the eyes of noon;And earth, because he craves of her no boon,Yields him deep-breasted, sun-steeped destiny.
With folded arms, against his staff he stands,Sun-soaking, rapt, within the August blazeThe while his sheep with moving rustle grazeThe lean, parched undergrowth of stubble lands.
Indifferent 'neath the low blue-laden skyHe gazes fearless in the eyes of noon;And earth, because he craves of her no boon,Yields him deep-breasted, sun-steeped destiny.
But these characters are not living people, they are types rather than individuals, and idealized a little. They are, as it were, seen from a distance, in passing, and in a golden light. Years were to pass before knowledge and insight could envisage them completely and a dramatic sense could endow them with life. Meantime the more characteristic qualities of this early work were to develop independently. The lyrical power of it, in particular, was to enjoy its flowering time, revelling in the sweet melancholy of old unhappy love stories, in courts and rose-gardens, kings and queens, knights and ladies and lute-players. Perhaps the most charming examples in this kind are "The Songs of Queen Averlaine." Here are a couple of stanzas from one of them, in which the queen is brooding sadly over the thought of her lost love and lost youth:
Spring comes no more for me: though young March blowTo flame the larches, and from tree to treeThe green fire leap, till all the woodland, glow—Though every runnel, filled to overflow,Bear sea-ward, loud and brown with melted snow,Spring comes no more for me!.....Spring comes no more for me: though May will shakeWhite flame of hawthorn over all the lea,Till every thick-set hedge and tangled brakePuts on fresh flower of beauty for her sake;Though all the world from winter-sleep awake,Spring comes no more for me!
Spring comes no more for me: though young March blowTo flame the larches, and from tree to treeThe green fire leap, till all the woodland, glow—Though every runnel, filled to overflow,Bear sea-ward, loud and brown with melted snow,Spring comes no more for me!
.....
Spring comes no more for me: though May will shakeWhite flame of hawthorn over all the lea,Till every thick-set hedge and tangled brakePuts on fresh flower of beauty for her sake;Though all the world from winter-sleep awake,Spring comes no more for me!
They are graceful songs, and their glamour will not fail so long as there remain lovers to read them. The critic is disarmed by their ingenuousness: he is constrained to take them as they stand, with their warmth and colour, their sweet music and the occasional flashes of observed truth (like the March runnels of this poem) which redeem them from total unreality. The reward lies close ahead. For even on this theme of love, and still in the lyric mood, sanity soon triumphs. It heralds its victory with a laugh, and the air is lightened at once from the scented gloom of romanticism. "Sing no more songs of lovers dead," it cries, sound and strong enough now to make fun of itself.
We are no lovers, pale with dreams,Who languish by Lethean streams.Upon our bodies warm day gleams;And love that tingles warm and redFrom sole of foot to crown of headIs lord of all pale lovers dead!
We are no lovers, pale with dreams,Who languish by Lethean streams.Upon our bodies warm day gleams;And love that tingles warm and redFrom sole of foot to crown of headIs lord of all pale lovers dead!
The volume from which that stanza is taken,The Web of Life, contains this poet's finest lyrics. From the standpoint of art nothing that he has done—and he is always a scrupulous artist—can surpass it; and the seeker whose single quest is beauty, need go no further down the list of Mr Gibson's works. There are some perfect things in the book: poems like "Song," "The Mushroom Gatherers" and "The Silence," in which the early grace and felicity survive; and where the lyric ecstasy is deepened by thought and winged by emotion. In one sense, therefore, although this volume is only midway through the period we are concerned with, it has attained finality. We ought to pause on it. We see that it culminates and closes the 'happy singing-flight' with which this career began. We realize, too, that it has absolute value, as poetry, by virtue of which many a good judge might rank it higher than its remarkable successors. And, indeed, it is hard to break away from its spell. But when we judgeThe Web of Liferelatively, when we place it back in the proper niche amongst its kindred volumes, its importanceseems suddenly to dwindle. Beside the later books, it grows almost commonplace; we perceive its charm to be of the conventional kind of the whole order of regular English poetry to which it belongs. That is to say, though there is no sign that the work has been directly modelled upon the accredited poets of an earlier generation, it has characteristics which relate it to them and secure a place in the line of descent. There are pieces which remind us of Keats or the younger Tennyson. Here is a stanza from the poem called "Beauty" which might have been the inspiration of the whole book:
With her alone is immortality;For still men reverentlyAdore within her shrine:The sole immortal time has not cast down,She wields a power yet more divineThan when of old she rose from out the seaOf night, with starry crown.Though all things perish, Beauty never dies.
With her alone is immortality;For still men reverentlyAdore within her shrine:The sole immortal time has not cast down,She wields a power yet more divineThan when of old she rose from out the seaOf night, with starry crown.Though all things perish, Beauty never dies.
Or there are poems in which passion trembles under a fine restraint, as in "Friends":
Yet, are we friends: the gods have granted this.Withholding wine, they brimmed for us the cupWith cool, sweet waters, ever welling up,That we might drink, and, drinking, dream of bliss......O gods, in your cold mercy, merciless,Heed lest time raze your thrones; and at the sign,The cool, sweet-welling waters turn to wine;The spark to day, and dearth to bounteousness.
Yet, are we friends: the gods have granted this.Withholding wine, they brimmed for us the cupWith cool, sweet waters, ever welling up,That we might drink, and, drinking, dream of bliss.
.....
O gods, in your cold mercy, merciless,Heed lest time raze your thrones; and at the sign,The cool, sweet-welling waters turn to wine;The spark to day, and dearth to bounteousness.
And there is the group of classical pieces at the end of the book, in which one regretfully passes over the flexible blank-verse of "Helen in Rhodos" and "The Mariners," to choose a still more characteristic passage from "A Lament for Helen":
Helen has fallen: she for whom Troy fellHas fallen, even as the fallen towers.O wanderers in dim fields of asphodel,Who spilt for her the wine of earthly hours,With you for evermoreBy Lethe's darkling shoreYour souls' desire shall dwell......But we who sojourn yet in earthly ways;How shall we sing, now Helen lieth dead?Break every lyre and burn the withered bays,For song's sweet solace is with Helen fled.Let sorrow's silence beThe only threnodyO'er beauty's fallen head.
Helen has fallen: she for whom Troy fellHas fallen, even as the fallen towers.O wanderers in dim fields of asphodel,Who spilt for her the wine of earthly hours,With you for evermoreBy Lethe's darkling shoreYour souls' desire shall dwell.
.....
But we who sojourn yet in earthly ways;How shall we sing, now Helen lieth dead?Break every lyre and burn the withered bays,For song's sweet solace is with Helen fled.Let sorrow's silence beThe only threnodyO'er beauty's fallen head.
But this book, which is so good an example of poetic art in the older English manner, is not Mr Gibson's distinguishing achievement. That cameimmediately afterwards, and was the outcome of the changed ideal which we have already noted.The Web of Lifemay be said to belong to a definite school—though to be sure its relation to that school is in affinity rather than actual resemblance. The books which follow have no such relation: they stand alone and refuse to be classified, either in subject or in form. And while the earlier work would seem to claim its author for the nineteenth century, inDaily Breadhe is new-born a twentieth-century poet of full stature.
The most striking evidence of the change is in the subject-matter.Daily Bread, likeFires, is in three parts, and each of them contains six or seven pieces. There is thus a total of about forty poems, every one of which is created out of an episode from the lives of the working poor. Thus we find a young countryman, workless and destitute in a London garret, joined by his village sweetheart who refuses to leave him to starve alone. A farm labourer and his wife are rising wearily in the cold dawn to earn bread for the six sleeping children. There are miners and quarrymen in some of the many dangers of their calling, and their womenfolk enduring privation, suspense and bereavement with tireless courage. There is a stoker, dying from burns that he has sustained at the furnace, whose young wiferetorts with passionate bitterness to a hint of compensation:
Money ... woman ... money!I want naught with their money.I want my husband,And my children's father.Let them pitch all their money in the furnaceWhere he ...I wouldn't touch a penny;'Twould burn my fingers.Money ...For him!
Money ... woman ... money!I want naught with their money.I want my husband,And my children's father.Let them pitch all their money in the furnaceWhere he ...I wouldn't touch a penny;'Twould burn my fingers.Money ...For him!
There are fishermen in peril of the sea; the printer, the watchman, the stonebreaker, the lighthousekeeper, the riveter, the sailor, the shopkeeper; there are school-children and factory girls; outcasts, tramps and gipsies; and a splendid company of women—mothers in childbirth and child-death, sisters, wives and sweethearts—more heroic in their obscure suffering and toil than the noblest figure of ancient tragedy. With deliberate intention, therefore, the poet has set himself to represent contemporary industrial life: the strata at the base of our civilization. He has, as it were, won free at a leap from illusion, from a dominant idealism, and the jealous, tyrannical instinct for mere beauty. Life is the inspiration now, and truth the objective. The facts of the workers' lives are carefully observed,realized in all their significance and faithfully recorded. Sympathy and penetration go hand in hand. Personal faults and follies, superstitions and vices, play their part in these little dramas, no less than the social wrongs under which the people labour. And the conception, in its balance and comprehensiveness, is really great; for while on the one hand there is an humiliating indictment of our civilization (implicit, of course, but none the less complete) on the other hand there is a proud vindication of the invincible human spirit.
Viewed steadily thus, by a poetic genius which has subdued the conventions of its art, such themes are shown to possess a latent but inalienable power to exalt the mind. They are therefore of the genuine stuff of art, needing only the formative touch of the poet to evoke beauty. And thus we find that although the normal process seems to have been reversed here: although the poet has sought truth first—in event, in character and in environment—beauty has been nevertheless attained; and of a type more vital and complete than that evoked by the statelier themes of tradition.
As might have been expected the new material and method have directly influenced form; and hence arises another distinction of these later works. The three parts ofDaily Breadand the play calledWomenkindare the extreme example; and their verse is probably unique in English poetry. It has been evolved out of the actual substance on which the poet is working; directly moulded by the nature of the life that he has chosen to present. The poems here are dramatic; and whether the element of dialogue or of narrative prevail, the language is always the living idiom of the persons who are speaking. It is nervous, supple, incisive: not, of course, with much variety or colour, since the vocabulary of such people could not be large and its colour might often be too crude for an artist's use. Selection has played its part, in words as in incidents; but although anything in the nature of dialect has been avoided, we are convinced as we read that this is indeed the speech of labouring folk. We can even recognize, in a light touch such as an occasional vocative, that they are the sturdy folk of the North country. There is a dialogue called "On the Road" which illustrates that, as well as more important things. Just under the surface of it lies the problem of unemployment: a young couple forced to go on tramp, with their infant child, because the husband has lost his job. That, however, inheres in the episode: it is not emphasized, nor even formulated, as a problem. The appeal of the poem is in its fine delineation ofcharacter, the interplay of emotion, the rapid and telling dialogue—the pervasive humanitarian spirit; and, once again, an exact and full perception of the woman's point of view. Mr Gibson is a poet of his time in this as well—in his large comprehension and generous acknowledgment of the feminine part in the scheme of things. I do not quote to illustrate that, because it is an almost constant factor in his work. But I give a passage in which the Northern flavour is distinctly perceptible, in addition to qualities which are limited to no locality—the kindliness of the poor to each other and their native courtesy. An old stonebreaker has just passed the starving couple by the roadside and, divining the extremity they are at, he turns back to them:
Fine morning, mate and mistress!Might you be looking for a job, my lad?Well ... there's a heap of stones to break, down yonder.I was just on my way ...But I am old;And, maybe, a bit idle;And you look young,And not afraid of work,Or I'm an ill judge of a workman's hands.And when the job's done, lad,There'll be a shilling......Nay, but there's naught to thank me for.I'm old;And I've no wife and children,And so, don't need the shilling......Well, the heap's down yonder—There, at the turning.Ah, the bonnie babe!We had no children, mistress.And what can any old man do with shillings,With no one but himself to spend them on—An idle, good-for-nothing, lone old man?
Fine morning, mate and mistress!Might you be looking for a job, my lad?Well ... there's a heap of stones to break, down yonder.I was just on my way ...But I am old;And, maybe, a bit idle;And you look young,And not afraid of work,Or I'm an ill judge of a workman's hands.And when the job's done, lad,There'll be a shilling.
.....
Nay, but there's naught to thank me for.I'm old;And I've no wife and children,And so, don't need the shilling.
.....
Well, the heap's down yonder—There, at the turning.Ah, the bonnie babe!We had no children, mistress.And what can any old man do with shillings,With no one but himself to spend them on—An idle, good-for-nothing, lone old man?
The curious structure of the verse is apparent at a glance—the irregular pattern, the extreme variation in the length of the line, the absence of rhyme and the strange metrical effects. It is a new poetical instrument, having little outward resemblance to the grace and dignity of regular forms. Its unfamiliarity may displease the eye and the ear at first, but it is not long before we perceive the design which controls its apparent waywardness, and recognize its fitness to express the life that the poet has chosen to depict. For it suggests, as no rhyme or regular measure could, the ruggedness of this existence and the characteristic utterance of its people. No symmetrical verse, with its sense of something complete, precise and clear, could convey such an impression as this—of speechstruggling against natural reticence to express the turmoil of thought and emotion in an untrained mind. Mr Gibson has invented a metrical form which admirably produces that effect, without condescending to a crude realism. He has made the worker articulate, supplying just the coherence and lucidity which art demands, but preserving, in this irregular outline, in the plain diction and simple phrasing, an acute sense of reality. Here is a fragment of conversation, one of many similar, in which this verse is found to be a perfect medium of the idea. A wife has been struck by her husband in a fit of passion: she has been trying to hide from her mother the cause of the blow, but she is still weak from the effects of it and has not lied skilfully. Her mother gently protests that she is trying to screen her husband: