Chapter II: Part 2

Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?... oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

_William H. Davies_

I should think that the work of Mr Davies is the nearest approach that the poetic genius could make to absolute simplicity. It is a wonderful thing, too, in its independence, its almost complete isolation from literary tradition and influence. People talk of Herrick in connexion with this poet; and if they mean no more than to wonder at a resemblance which is a marvellous accident, one would run to join them in their happy amazement. But there is no evidence of direct influence, any more than by another token we could associate his realism with that of Crabbe. No, this is verse which has "growed," autochthonic if poetry ever were, unliterary, and spontaneous in the many senses of that word.

From that one fact alone, these seven small volumes of verse are a singular phenomenon. But they teem with interest of other kinds too. First and foremost there is, of course, the preciousness of many of the pieces they contain, as pure poetry, undimmed by any other consideration whatsoever. That applies to a fair proportion of this work; and it is a delightsomeness which, from its very independence of time and circumstance, one looks quite soberly to last the centuries through; and if it lapse at all from favour, to be rediscovered two or three hundred years hence as we have rediscovered the poets of the seventeenth century.

It has, however, inherent interest apart from this æsthetic joy, something which catches and holds the mind, startling it with an apparent paradox. For this poetry, with its solitariness and absence of any affiliation ancient or modern, with its bird-note bubbling into song at some sweet impulse and seemingly careless of everything but the impelling rapture, is at the same time one of the grimmest pages out of contemporary life. In saying that, one pauses for a moment sternly to interrogate one's own impression. How much of this apparent paradox is due to knowledge derived from the author's astounding autobiography? Turn painfully back for a moment to the thoughts and feelings aroused by that book: recall the rage against the stupidity of life which brings genius to birth so carelessly, endowing it with appetites too strong for the will to tame and senses too acute for the mind to leash until the soul had been buffeted and the body maimed. And admit at once that such a tale, all the more for its quiet veracity, could not fail to influence one's attitude to this poetry. No doubt it is that which gives assurance, certainty, the proof of actual data, to the human record adumbrated in the poems. But the record is no less present _in_ the poems. It often exists, implicit or explicit, in that part of the verse which sings because it must and for sheer love of itself. And in that other part of the work where the lyric note is not so clear: in the narrative poems and queer character-studies and little dramatic pieces, the record lives vivid and almost complete. Perhaps it is the nature of the record itself which denies full inspiration to those pieces: perhaps Mr Davies' lyric gift cannot find its most fitting expression in themes so grim: in any case it is clear that these personal pieces are not equal to the lighter songs.

Now if one's conscience were supple enough to accept those lighter songs as Mr Davies' complete work: if we could conveniently forget the autobiography, and when visualizing his output, call up some charming collected edition of the poems with the unsatisfactory ones carefully deleted, we could go on with our study easily and gaily. We might pause a moment to marvel at this 'isolated phenomenon': we might even remark upon his detachment, not only from literature, but almost as completely from the ordinary concerns of life. That done, however, we should at once take a header into the delicious refreshment of the lyrics. Such a study would be very fascinating; and from the standpoint of Art as Art, it might not be inadequate. But it would totally lack significance. Even from the point of view of pure poetry, the loss would be profound--not to realize that behind the blithest of these trills of song is a background as stormy as any winter sky behind a robin on a bare bough. There is this one, for example, from the volume called _Foliage_:

If I were gusty April now,
How I would blow at laughing Rose;
I'd make her ribbons slip their knots,
And all her hair come loose.

If I were merry April now,
How I would pelt her cheeks with showers;
I'd make carnations rich and warm,
Of her vermilion flowers.

Since she will laugh in April's face,
No matter how he rains or blows--
Then O that I wild April were,
To play with laughing Rose.

The gaiety of that, considered simply in its lightness of heart, its verbal and metrical felicity, is a delightful thing. And it recurs so frequently as to make Mr Davies quite the jolliest of modern poets. So if we are content to stop there, if we are not teased by an instinct to relate things, and see all round them, we may make holiday pleasantly enough with this part of the poet's work. The method is not really satisfying, however, and the inclusion of the more personal pieces adds a deeper value to the study. Not merely because the facts of a poet's life are interesting in themselves, but because here especially they are illuminating, explanatory, suggestive: connecting and unifying the philosophical interest of the work, and supplying a background, curiously impressive, for its art.

For that reason one would refuse to pass over in silence Mr Davies' first book of poems, _The Soul's Destroyer_, published in 1907. Not that it is perfect poetry: indeed, I doubt whether one really satisfying piece could be chosen from the whole fourteen. But it has deep human interest. The book is slim, sombre, almost insignificant in its paper wrappers. But its looks belie it. It is, in fact, nothing less than a flame of courage, a shining triumph of the spirit of humanity. Mr Shaw has made play with the facts of this poet's life, partly because 'it is his nature so to do,' and partly, one suspects, to hide a deeper feeling. But play as you will with the willing vagabondage, the happy irresponsibility, the weakness and excess and error of a wild youth, you will only film the surface of the tragedy. Underneath will remain those sullen questions--what is life about, what are our systems and our laws about, that a human creature and one with the miraculous spark of genius in him, is chased hungry and homeless up and down his own country, tossed from continent to continent and thrown up at last, broken and all but helpless, to be persecuted by some contemptible agent of charity and to wander from one crowded lodging-house to another, seeking vainly for a quiet corner in which to make his songs. The verses in _The Soul's Destroyer_ were written under those conditions; and by virtue of that it would seem that the drab little volume attains to spiritual magnificence.

The themes in this book and those of _New Poems_, published in the same year, are of that personal kind of which we have already spoken. But you will be quite wrong if you suppose that they are therefore gloomy. On the contrary, though there is an occasional didactic piece, like that which gives its title to the first volume, there is more often a vein of humour. Thus we have the astonishing catalogue of lodging-house humanity in "Saints and Lodgers" with the satirical flavour of its invocation:

Ye saints, that sing in rooms above,
Do ye want souls to consecrate?

And there is "The Jolly Tramp," a scrap of autobiography, perhaps the least bit coloured:

I am a jolly tramp: I whine to you,
Then whistles till I meet another fool.
I call the labourer sir, the boy young man,
The maid young lady, and the mother I
Will flatter through the youngest child that walks.

In "Wondering Brown" there is surely something unique in poetry: not alone in theme, and the extraordinary set of circumstances which enabled such a bit of life to be observed, by a poet, from the inside; but in the rare quality of it, its sympathetic satire, the genial incisiveness of its criticism of life:

There came a man to sell his shirt,
A drunken man, in life low down;
When Riley, who was sitting near,
Made use of these strange words to Brown.

"Yon fallen man, that's just gone past,
I knew in better days than these;
Three shillings he could make a day,
As an adept at picking peas."

.....

"You'd scarcely credit it, I knew
A man in this same house, low down,
Who owns a fish-shop now--believe
Me, or believe me not," said Brown.

"He was a civil sort of cove,
But did queer things, for one low down:
Oft have I watched him clean his teeth--
As true as Heaven's above!" cried Brown.

This humorous quality is the most marked form of an attitude of detachment which may be observed in most of the personal pieces. So complete is this detachment sometimes, as in "Strange People" or "Scotty Bill" or "Facts," that one is tempted to a heresy. Is it possible, in view of this lightness of touch, this untroubled pace and coolness of word and phrase, that the poet did not see the implications of what he was recording, or seeing them, was not greatly moved by them? Now there are certain passages which prove that that doubt is a heresy: that the poet did perceive and feel the complete significance of the facts he was handling. Otherwise, of course, he were no poet. There is evidence of this in such a poem as "A Blind Child," from which I quote a couple of stanzas:

We're in the garden, where are bees
And flowers, and birds, and butterflies;
There is one greedy fledgling cries
For all the food his parent sees!

I see them all: flowers of all kind,
The sheep and cattle on the leas;
The houses up the hills, and trees--
But I am dumb, for she is blind.

There is, too, the last stanza of "Facts," a narrative piece which relates the infamous treatment by workhouse officials of an old and dying man:

Since Jesus came with mercy and love,
'Tis nineteen hundred years and five:
They made that dying man break stones,
In faith that Christ is still alive.

A hideous scrap of notoriety for A.D. 1905!--and proof enough to convince us of our author's humanity. At the same time, however, it is the fact that there is little sign of intense emotion in this work. One comes near it, perhaps, in a passage in "The Forsaken Dead," where the poet is musing in the burial-place of a deserted settlement, and breaks into wrath at the tyranny which drove the people out:

Had they no dreamer who might have remained
To sing for them these desolated scenes?
One who might on a starvèd body take
Strong flights beyond the fiery larks in song,
With awful music, passionate with hate?

But that is a rare example. Deep emotion is not a feature of Mr Davies' poetry: neither in the poems of life, which might be supposed to awaken it directly; nor, stranger still, in the infrequent love poems; nor in the lyrics of nature. It would be interesting to speculate on this, if there were any use in it--whether it is after all just a sign of excessive feeling, masked by restraint; whether it may be in some way a reaction from a life of too much sensation; or whether it simply means that emotion is nicely balanced by objective power. Perhaps an analysis would determine the question in the direction of a balance of power; but the fact remains that though sensibility has a wide range, though it is quick, acute and tender, it is not intense.

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that these earlier volumes are only interesting on the personal side. The pure lyric note is uttered first here: once or twice in a small perfect song, as "The Likeness" and "Parted"; but oftener in a snatch or a broken trill, as

He who loves Nature truly, hath
His wealth in her kind hands; and it
Is in safe trust until his death,
Increasing as he uses it.

Or a passage from "Music," invoking the memory of childhood:

O happy days of childhood, when
We taught shy Echo in the glen
Words she had never used before--
Ere Age lost heart to summon her.
Life's river, with its early rush,
Falls into a mysterious hush
When nearing the eternal sea:
Yet we would not forgetful be,
In these deep, silent days so wise,
Of shallows making mighty noise
When we were young, when we were gay,
And never thought Death lived--that day.

Or a fragment from "The Calm," when the poet has been thinking of his "tempestuous past," and contrasts it with his present well-being, and the country joys which he fears will be snatched away again:

But are these pleasant days to keep?
Where shall I be when Summer comes?
When, with a bee's mouth closed, she hums
Sounds not to wake, but soft and deep,
To make her pretty charges sleep?

The love of Nature which supplies the theme here is a characteristic that persists throughout the subsequent volumes. It recurs more and more frequently, until the autobiographical element is almost eliminated; and just as it is the main motive of the later poetry, so it is its happiest inspiration. It is rather a pagan feeling, taking great joy in the beauty of the material world, revelling in the impressions of sight and scent, sound and taste and touch. It is humane enough to embrace the whole world of animal life; but it seeks no spirit behind the phenomena of Nature, and cares precisely nothing about its more scientific aspect. Its gay lightsomeness is a charming thing to watch, an amazing thing to think about:

For Lord, how merry now am I!
Tickling with straw the butterfly,
Where she doth in her clean, white dress,
Sit on a green leaf, motionless,
To hear Bees hum away the hours.

Or again, from "Leisure," in _Songs of Joy_:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

.....

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

.....

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

And a "Greeting," from the volume called _Foliage_:

Good morning, Life--and all
Things glad and beautiful.
My pockets nothing hold,
But he that owns the gold,
The Sun, is my great friend--
His spending has no end.
Hail to the morning sky,
Which bright clouds measure high;
Hail to you birds whose throats
Would number leaves by notes;
Hail to you shady bowers,
And you green fields of flowers.

The poet does not claim to be learned in nature lore: indeed he declares in one place that he does not know 'the barley from the oats.' But he has a gift of fancy which often plays about his observation with delightful effect. One could hardly call it by so big a name as imagination: that suggests a height and power of vision which this work does not possess, and which one would not look for in this type of genius. It is a lighter quality, occasionally childlike in its naïveté, fantastical, graceful, even quaint. It is seen in simile sometimes, as this from _The Soul's Destroyer_, describing the sky:

It was a day of rest in heaven, which seemed
A blue grass field thick dotted with white tents
Which Life slept late in, though 'twere holiday.

Or this account of the origin of the Kingfisher, from "Farewell to Poesy":

It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,
And left thee all her lovely hues;
And, as her mother's name was Tears,
So runs it in thy blood to choose
For haunts the lonely pools, and keep
In company with trees that weep.

Or a fancy about the sound of rain from _Nature Poems_:

I hear leaves drinking rain;
I hear rich leaves on top
Giving the poor beneath
Drop after drop;
'Tis a sweet noise to hear
Those green leaves drinking near.

It plays an important part too in the poems upon other favourite themes, on a woman's hair, on her voice, on music. Such are "Sweet Music" and "A Maiden and her Hair" in _Nature Poems_: as well as "The Flood," from which I quote. It will be found in _Songs of Joy_:

I thought my true love slept;
Behind her chair I crept
And pulled out a long pin;
The golden flood came out,
She shook it all about,
With both our faces in.

Ah! little wren I know
Your mossy, small nest now
A windy, cold place is:
No eye can see my face,
Howe'er it watch the place
Where I half drown in bliss.

A development of technique in the later work lends ease and precision to the poet's use of his instrument. Little faults of metre and of rhyme are corrected: banalities of phrase and crudities of thought almost disappear, so that the verse acquires a new grace. It gains, too, from a wider variety of form: for the verses may be as short as one foot, or as long as five: and there may be stanzas of only two lines, or anything up to eight. There are even pieces written in the closed couplet and in blank verse. But Mr Davies is by no means an innovator in his art, as so many of his contemporaries are. The variety we have noted is, after all, only a modification of traditional form and not a departure from it; and always as its basis, the almost constant unit is the iamb. Very rarely is any other measure adopted; and so well does the iamb suit the simple and direct nature of this work in thought, word and phrase, that one would not often alter it. One of the perfect examples of its fitness is in "The Battle," from _Nature Poems_:

There was a battle in her face,
Between a Lily and a Rose:
My Love would have the Lily win
And I the Lily lose.

I saw with joy that strife, first one,
And then the other uppermost;
Until the Rose roused all its blood,
And then the Lily lost.

When she's alone, the Lily rules,
By her consent, without mistake:
But when I come that red Rose leaps
To battle for my sake.

Occasionally, however, and especially in the longer poems, the regular recurrence of the iamb is a little monotonous. Then a wish just peeps out that Mr Davies were more venturous: that he had some slight experimental turn, or that he did not stand quite so far aloof from the influences which, within his sight and hearing, are shaping a new kind of poetic expression. But the regret may be put aside. The fresh forms which those others are evolving are valid for them--for life as they conceive it--for the wider range and the more complex nature of the experience out of which they are distilling the poetic essence. For him, however, the lyric mood burns clear and untroubled, kindling directly to the beauty of simple and common things. And instinctively he seeks to embody it in cadence and measure which are sweetly familiar. When some exhilarating touch quickens and lightens his verse with a more tripping measure, as in "The Laughers" (from _Nature Poems_) its gay charm is irresistible.

Mary and Maud have met at the door,
Oh, now for a din; I told you so:
They're laughing at once with sweet, round mouths,
Laughing for what? does anyone know?

Is it known to the bird in the cage,
That shrieketh for joy his high top notes,
After a silence so long and grave--
What started at once those two sweet throats?

Is it known to the Wind that takes
Advantage at once and comes right in?
Is it known to the cock in the yard,
That crows--the cause of that merry din?

Is it known to the babe that he shouts?
Is it known to the old, purring cat?
Is it known to the dog, that he barks
For joy--what Mary and Maud laugh at?

Is it known to themselves? It is not,
But beware of their great shining eyes;
For Mary and Maud will soon, I swear,
Find cause to make far merrier cries.

It is hard to close even a slight study of Mr Davies' work without another glance at his originality. One hesitates to use that word, strained and tortured as it often is to express a dozen different meanings. It might be applied, in one sense or another, to nearly all our contemporary poets, with whom it seems to be an article of artistic faith to avoid like the plague any sign of being derivative. So, although their minds may be steeped in older poetry, they deliberately turn away from its influence, seeking inspiration in life itself. There is no doubt that they are building up a new kind of poetry, with values that sound strange perhaps to the unfamiliar ear, but which bid fair to enlarge the field for the poetic genius and enrich it permanently. But the crux of the question for us at this moment is the fact of effort, the deliberate endeavour which is made by those poets to escape from tradition. No sign of such an effort is visible in Mr Davies' work, and yet it is the most original of them all--the newest, freshest, and most spontaneous.

The reason lies, of course, in the qualities we have already noted. It is not entirely an external matter, as the influence of his career might lead us to believe. That has naturally played its part, making the substance of some of his verse almost unique; and, more important still, guarding him from bookishness and leaving his mind free to receive and convey impressions at first hand. From this come the bracing freshness of his poetry, its naïveté of language, its apparent artlessness and unconscious charm. But the root of the matter lies deeper than that, mainly I think in the sincerity and simplicity which are the chief qualities of his genius. Both qualities are fundamental and constant, vitalizing the work and having a visible influence upon its form. For, on the one hand, we see that simplicity reflected not only in the thought, and themes, but in the language and the technique of this poetry; while on the other hand there is a loyalty which is absolutely faithful to its own experience and the laws of its own nature.

_Walter De La Mare_

There is one sense in which this poet has never grown up, and we may, if we please, recapture our own childhood as we wander with him through his enchanted garden. And if it be true, as John Masefield says, that "the days that make us happy make us wise," it is blessed wisdom that should be ours at the end of our ramble. For see what a delightful place it is! Not one of your opulent, gorgeous gardens, with insolently well-groomed lawns and beds that teem with precious nurselings; but a much homelier region, and one of more elusive and delicate charm. Boundaries there are, for order and safe going, but they are hidden away in dancing foliage: and there are leafy paths which seem to wind into infinity, and corners where mystery lurks.

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 wild things 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....

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 as subtle 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 out
In the leaf-green light.

And her beauty far away
Would fade, as her voice ran on,
Till hazel and summer sun
And all were gone:--

All fordone and forgot;
And like clouds in the height of the sky,
Our hearts stood still in the hush
Of 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 called _The 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 suspect the 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 is something 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 plundered
The 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 churchyard
Of all save stones.

Owl and Newt and Nightjar,
Leveret, Bat and Mole
Haunt 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 mystical creed; 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 listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To 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 shaken
By 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, even
Louder, 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?

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 in it. 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 break
Out of the briar's boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are--
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.

.....

Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve's nightingales;
We walk and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of 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 which the _Lyrical Ballads_ were 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 their work 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 children
Far away are gone.

He sits beneath his jasmined porch,
His stick between his knees,
His eyes fixed vacant
On his moss-grown trees.

.....

But as in pale high autumn skies
The 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 be
Denser 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 significant fact 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!

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 gun
And 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 me
And Nicholas Nye.

_Wilfrid Wilson Gibson_

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. Place _Urlyn the Harper_--which was first published--beside a late play called _Womenkind_ or a still more recent dramatic piece called _Bloodybush 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 the word 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 Mark
To 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 in _Bloodybush Edge_. A couple of tramps have met at night on the 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 high
For 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 sky
Had come alive about me in the night,
And they were watching me; as though I stood
Naked, 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 stars
Were eyeing me; and whisperings in the heather
Were 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 of _Stonefolds_; and when the first part of _Daily Bread_ appeared, the impulse had become a reasoned principle. In the poem which prefaces that 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 call
Of golden-plovers in their seaward flight,
Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fall
Through tingling silence of the frosty night--
Who lies and listens, till the last note fails,
And then, in fancy, faring with the flock
Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales,
Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock;
And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned
Within the mightier music of the deep,
No more remembers the sweet piping sound
That 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 called _Faring 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 blaze
The while his sheep with moving rustle graze
The lean, parched undergrowth of stubble lands.

Indifferent 'neath the low blue-laden sky
He 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 blow
To flame the larches, and from tree to tree
The 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 shake
White flame of hawthorn over all the lea,
Till every thick-set hedge and tangled brake
Puts 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 red
From sole of foot to crown of head
Is lord of all pale lovers dead!