Part 9 (1/2)
But Mary, ”in her rapt girlhood,” with her ”eyes like the rain-shadowed sea,” is not the less sweet because she stands for an idea.
Through meadows flowering with happiness Went Mary, feeling not the air that laid Honours of gentle dew upon her head; Nor that the sun now loved with golden stare The marvellous behaviour of her hair, Bending with finer swerve from off her brow Than water which relents before a prow; Till in the shrinking darkness many a gleam Of secret bronze-red l.u.s.tres answered him.
And when the Spirit of Life vaunts itself in her,
Not vain his boast; for seemly to the Lord, Blue-robed and yellow-kerchieft, Mary went.
There never was to G.o.d such wors.h.i.+p sent By any angel in the Heavenly ways, As this that Life had utter'd for G.o.d's praise, This girlhood--as the service that Life said In the beauty and the manners of this maid.
Never the harps of Heaven played such song As her grave walking through the gra.s.ses long.
I cannot dwell upon the subject of _The Sale of St. Thomas_. The dialogue between Thomas and the captain gives opportunity for description and metaphor almost Elizabethan in their ferocity, though the reflections of Thomas have a spiritual quality which is entirely modern. We hear
Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind.
And of flies staring
Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes.
And there are lines such as
Men there have been who could so grimly look That soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames Before their eyes, and the blood perisht in them,
which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's:
The frowning looks of fiery _Tamburlaine_ That with his terrour and imperious eies, Commands the hearts of his a.s.sociates.
And we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more philosophic pa.s.sages:
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight To pore only within the candle-gleam Of conscious wit and reasonable brain; But search into the sacred darkness lying Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast Measureless fate, full of the power of stars, The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.
We may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men of the stamp of Mr. Abercrombie, men for whom poetry is neither a plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or vague dreams; but a serious attempt to grapple with life through combined experience, thought, and vision. Long ago Meredith urged that if fiction was to go on living, it must give us ”brain-stuff” and ”food-stuff.” But no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim for poetry; to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with intelligence, with common sense, and with virile pa.s.sion.
Mr. W.H. Davies stands apart from them all. I should not like to try to account in any way for Mr. Davies any more than he could account for a singing-bird by describing the trees among which it lived. His poetry is unlike any other poetry that is written to-day. It is fresh and sweet like a voice from a younger and l.u.s.tier world. It is charged with no clarion message of prophecy; it is burdened with no exactly formulated philosophy of life. There is no rhetoric in it, no rhodomontade. It is the melody of a man's voice singing for the pleasure of singing, now vehemently, from the sheer delight in things physical and outward, now sadly, as some evanescent object induces melancholy, now in a naively reflective way, as past or future brings memories or expectations. He never reaches quite the exquisite melodies of Herrick, but when he writes of love he is as simple as Herrick, and he is more direct, more heart-whole, less of the perfect singer, perhaps, but more of the lover. If he writes with wide-eyed wonder at the simpler marvels of life, it is in the manner of Blake in _Songs of Innocence_, where outwardness of manner and lyrical simplicity leave an impression of something unearthly in its strangeness. Occasionally in the slight extravagance of his imagery we can see that the influence of the seventeenth-century ”metaphysical”
poets has not left him unscathed, as when he likens love to the influence of spring opening up navigation.
But it is a sure instinct which has taken him to the simpler lyrical poets and led him to mould his style on theirs. His interests lie in the purely personal affairs of the heart; the simpler emotions may be best expressed in those lyrical forms in which the older English literature is pre-eminent, which eschew the fervid rhythms of the soulful nineteenth century. But he is not merely imitative. Sometimes in the same poem we see him, now conforming to the manner of the traditional love-poet, now revivifying it or bursting through it with images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself.
She had two eyes as blue as Heaven, Ten times as warm they shone; And yet her heart was hard and cold As any sh.e.l.l or stone.
Her mouth was like a soft red rose When Phbus drinks its dew; But oh, that cruel thorn inside Pierced many a fond heart through.
She had a step that walked unheard, It made the stones like gra.s.s; Yet that light step has crushed a heart, As light as that step was.
Those glowing eyes, those smiling lips, I have lived now to prove Were not for me, were not for me, But came of her self-love.
Yet, like a cow for acorns that Have made it suffer pain, So, though her charms are poisonous, I moan for them again.