THE BOOKMAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 55, 27 May 1927, Page 10

THE BOOKMAN

r ßeviewSM & Notesp

Two Irish Poets

The following article on two great Irish singers is of especial interest. Miss Pamela Travers who writes this appreciation for readers of TIIE SUN is herself a poet of distinction. Her verses have been published in English and American publications and one of her poems was included in an anthology of the best English verse for 1925. Both Yeats and “A.E.” have taken a personal interest m her work.

TRELAND should by this time be used to producing giants. Since the old mythical days when the Fomorians fought with the Danaans, creatures of Brobdinagian stature have been matters of common interest in the ancient land of the west. But now the “‘eyes larger than windmills" and the mountainous feet have disappeared and the footsteps of other giants are in the green fields. These are content to be of little stature so that their songs be mountainous. And head and shoulders above a generation of singing giants stand George Russell (“A.E.”) and William Butler Yeats. These two were born within two years of each other and nurtured on the same ideals. They have fought for the same cause and have stood close together in friendship. Yet it would be difficult to find two men so dissimilar. Not only in their poetry—that, indeed, must needs be different, since Yeats’s poetry is all of life and eternity while to A.E. it represents a small part of life at best. Yeats, the greatest English-speaking poet of the time, is the fire when the flame is at its height—fierce, searing, manycoloured. A.E. glows like the coals that have settled down to mature crimson after the first flaring. Yeats has never ceased to cry out with bitterness and desire —the mighty, lonely crying ©f the eagle. He is rather like an eagle to look at with the grey plenteous hair thrust smoothly back from his brow and his profile like a bird wing-spread for flight. Everything about him is winged and swooping. In the room where he writes there are

two large cages full of little birds. The last time I saw him he drew the covers Xrom them for me. ‘‘Look,’* he srid, pointing to a small yellow bright-eyed thing that pressed an infinitesimal breast against the edge of the nest. “She’s sitting. In a week the eggs will begin to crack—” The bird moved slightly, displaying small eggs of trasient vein-blue and the poet’s wild-bird head stooped closer—wing greeting wing. For that moment he forgot all his precious pomps and ceremonies, his high white room with the” walls lined with book cases, the table where the pen lay waiting for his hand —forgot all these for a glimpse of fluttering yellow and the sound of high, sweet pipings. The eagle and the canary eyed one another with understanding and with, perhaps, a little envy on the part of the eagle for thhe small bird’s serene complacency. For Yeats has dealt in sorrow all his poetic life. That dim, grey ghost has been his chief stock-in-trade, his pride and his scourge and the gateway through which all his songs have come.

Like Richard Barnefield’s Philomel, he has

Leaned his breast up-till a thorn And there sung the dolefullest ditty—

Yeats has always courted the thorn. Even though he wrapped it in flowing robes and gave it gold hair and a wild passionate name it was still a thorn. He has taken his own silver heart and dashed it into little shining pieces and then cried out in sweet sequence ©f words to the beauty of the world — “Why have you done this?” The thorn was necessary to him. The prick of it loosened his tongue most beautifully.

Not so with A.E. He did not need a thorn and if he resembles any bird it is the thrush—a happy, kind brown bird that sings in hedgerows. His is the gentle mellow singing that has no roots in mortal sadness, but goes sighing softly after immortal things. Though his gift be not as great as that of his friend he, too, sings because his heart is bursting—but the seas that beat there are not of grief but of tenderness. He spills the same lovely, unpretentious, lone-but-not-lonely song as the hedge-haunting thrush sings at mid-day.

He is the most selfless of poets. He has been so busy becoming conscious of worlds beyond worlds that he has forgotten himself. Like his own tangled grey-and-brown beard he is a mixture of colours. The dreaming quiet of the mystic in him goes hand and hand with the most childlike candour and eagerness. He can be as shy as a child and suddenly cast shyness from him as a child does when it discovers a friend. His delight is to be with young people —or at any rate he makes them believe so. Being come now to 60 years he does not hesitate to confess that he is no wiser now than when he was a boy. Here is no elderly genius strutting about and posturing in the absurd attitudes of a demi-god. He does not dazzle youth by banging a table and saying, “This is so!” thereby shutting up every sluice gate and weir of the wild rivers that go tumbling through youth’s heart. Instead he says. “Look —I will open this door—oh, but just the littlest bit. See. Do not be frightened. Come through or not, just as you wish.” And the rivers come foaming through widening the narrow aperture he has made into a towering gateway, splashing him with their yellow froth and white froth. He will, maybe, cut a small channel to deflect certain stormy waters, or if waters be too mild and timid he will tell them great tales to urge the tides more wildly.

Most of the young Irish people writing to-day owe A.E. a debt which may not be paid except in the coin of lovely verse. In his own poems A.E. goes hunting and always the longed-for quarry is the same white fawn. Nearly all his i verses are questions put to the infinite I or frail moonlight histories of his own I exploits among the starry presences,

When he is sad he is sad without bitterness. Listen!

My wisdom crumbles, I am as a lone child, Oh, had I the heart now My weeping were wild. My palace dwindles Thin into air; The Ancient Darkness Is everywhere;

But the heart is gone That could understand, And the child is dead That had taken Its hand.

Poetry—all lovely poetry—touches A.E. into the light that might shine round the head of a seraph. It girds on him an armoury of fire. Hidden behind the bright and brooding blue-grey eyes lies a vast volume of the world’s poetry—an astounding anthology. He will bring out gems from it that have faded from many a memory, jewels that many eyes have never seen. He loves to tell the story of how he recited the following sonnet to Yeats. SHE DWELT AMONG THE SYCAMORES. A little boy outside the sycamore wood Saw on the wood’s edge gleam an ashgrey feather A kid held by one soft white ear for tether Trotted beside him in a playful mood. A little boy inside the sycamore wood Followed the ring-dove’s ash-grey gleam of feather, Noon wrapped the woods in veils of violet weather And on tip-toe the winds a-whispering stood. Deep in the woodland paused they, the six feet Lapped in the lemon daffodils—a bee In the long grass, four eyes droop low, a seat Of moss, a maiden weaving, singeth she "I am lone Lady Quietness, my sweet, And in this loom I weave thy destiny.” “Delightful—who wrote it£’ said the poet. A.E., chuckling, said, “You did, Willie!” These two, the morning thrush and the eagle of twilight, have drawn up after them, as if they were moons, vast tides of poetic thought in Ireland and England. Like the two stars pointing to the cross they watch the rivers of words flow by—some beating on Yeats’s shore, some on A.E.’s, others marking out strange twisting courses of their own. But these two watch with widely differing dreams. From A.E. the new darting rivers and the changing tides call forth a tender welcome, but knocking at Yeats’s door they hear him crying, “Oh, for the swinging of the yellow braids and all the sweet wild tumult over again!” —PAMELA TRAVERS.

EMILY DICKINSON, POET.

I Written for The Sun .] «np HE finest by a woman in the I English language.” It is a * towering claim, which Alice Meynell, Elizabeth Browning, and Christina Rossetti challenge. How many readers to whom those first names are familiar have heard of Emily Dickinson? She is 40 years dead, and only now has that pinnacled, pointed berg of her verse drifted up to our seas. She tells in a little poem of a polar flower that lost its way and wandered down to summer from the Arctic hem. Was it the flower or the summer that was bewildered? It is certainly we who are startled when from some polar limbo comes drifting the dreadful beauty of these floats of ice into our warmer air. Philosophy, they say, was more thrilling to her than a bird’s song; and yet she knew the thoughts of a bee. She knew that for him the aristocracy of honey meant a cloverhead, and misery separation from his rose. It was as a merchantman she saw the sun, a merchantman unrolling bales of opal cloth across a western sky. She knew the ways of a green storm. She panted with the sheep and was driven with the leaves. She became drunken with the summer, drunken with the beo in the foxglove, drunken with the bird, beak-deep in fruit. She reels through the byways, returning from inns of molten blue. On she goes,

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun.

In some of her poems she risked being quaint, but that strange secret life of hers, apart from humans, would account for that. She gave to the bees and birds the ways of the humans she lived without. In her burial of summer the boblink was in the procession and an aged bee led off the prayer. To some it might seem irreverent: In the name of the bee, And of the butterfly, And of the breeze, Amen.

There are other poems, too, that twitched decorous eyebrows. When, with grim humour, she addresses God as “burglar, banker, father,” it is less irony than familiarity; and it is not for us to say how far a soul may go. She was a Cortez of a woman. She shut herself away from men to find a new Darien in her own spirit. In her most daring rhymes there is a playfulness that is not insolence. When the stars appear at nightfall, she murmurs: “Father, You are punctual.” Out of the ruck, but not mutinous. This proves it: The red upon the hill Taketh away my will; If anybody sneer, Take care, for God is here. That’s all. She was an individualist, like Emerson, her neighbour and countryman. Alice Meynell, on the other hand, submitted to authority in a humble ecstasy. She and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were nobler poets, but this was the cleverest of the three. Cleverness w r as her (loom. So sharp, so fierce, so keen is her thought that one is caught up in her surf and flung breathless on the shore. Her style can be sum mad up in a phrase: swirl and blow. Something evidently hurt her past all healing. What it was no one knows. Perhaps she suffered from that worst form of snobbishness, intellectual loneliness. Old Higginson of the “Atlantic Monthly,” poor bewildered gallant editor, sought her out He thought her poems brilliant, but jerky and unHe was used to sheet lightning, but hers was forked. He bowed to her decision that she would not travel, and leaving her, he felt as if he had wasted earthly bows on Mignon or Thekla. It must not be thought that she was stormed in her solitude. She published very few poems and was left alone with her vanity

and her hurt. She speaks openly of it: My life closed twice before its close* It yet remains to see If immortality unveil A third event to me. So huge, so hopeless to conceive As those that twice hefell Parting is all we know of heav’n And all we need of hell. Nothing was too lowly for her word. The spider has two poems to himself. He is the neglected son of genius, and the snake is summer’s treason. Her line on the bells is sheer beauty—“swollen with the sky They leap upon their silver feet.” Even clowns had room in her mercy: A little madness in the Spring Is wholesome even in a king, But God be with the clown, Who ponders this tremendous scene, This whole experiment of green, As if it were his own. But it is on death that her keenest things are written. Her analysis of it became, alas, an obsession. Death was her subject always, at the last; but, like the icicle, her thought took different shapes in its ice. This is one of the least unpleasant: Was ever idleness like this, Within a hut of stone To bask the centuries away, Nor once look u*f> for dawn?

And yet, for all her obsession, there was joy rather than fear in the thought of it. She boasts that she is no more afraid of resurrection than

the east is of th e morn. Her philosophy was stern but sound. Effort, she found, was the honey in the lion; I said I gained it. This was all. Look how I clutch it Lest it fall, And I a pauper go; Unfitted by an instant’s grace For the contented beggar’s face I wore an hour ago. And in another poem she stresses the same thought, and cries that i 1 would be better to sink within reach of land than reach her blue peninsula, to perish of delight. How shall one place Emily Dickinson? It is hard to love her, and her ghost would rise to reject pity. Some times she affronts us, sometimes she brims us over. Poor lonely, fierce soul, she, like the bird in the fable, tore her bosom up for food, but not to feed a starving brood. It should not be hard to love that sweet “little tippler, leaning against the sun”; but in comes that other death-struck Emily like|the wife of Macbeth w*a Iking, and love drops down, a wrinkled leaf, unsummered before its hour. EILEEN DUGGAN. Wellington.

BOOKS REVIEWED.

A MIXED LOT. MR MARTIN ARMSTRONG is remembered by many people first and foremost as a poet, if not, indeed, as the poet who wrote that exquisite bit of woven tenderness, sadness, beauty, and humour, called “The Almswomen.” Mr de la Mare’s prose tales are obviously a poet’s tales: of Mr Armstrong’s tales not only is there not one which recalls his most familiar poem, there is hardly one which suggests its creation by a poet. This is a curious fact, which may be accounted for in 50 ways, all of them wrong. One of the 50 is that Mr Armstrong’s 14 tales are so many experiments; intellectual experiments, in which he has deliberately imposed upon himself one end and method after another. Not one of them has really forced itself upon him as a thing which could be perfectly expressed in only one way, in a way he must discover or die in the attempt. Not one, that is, is built by Martin Armstrong out of experience, which has become a vital part of Martiu Armstrong. And yet that is going too far; for it might appear to deny “Sea View” its delightful humane and humorous truth. The fact is that Mi Armstrong’s art comes here and there so near concealing itself in success that only a violent effort makes one remember the significant difference of his success as a poet and the equally significant and dazzling variety of these experiments in taletelling. How various they are, and though not one is perfect, how astonishingly good the best of them. There is the title-story, “Sir Pompey and Madame Juno” —no story at all: simply the summoning from airy nothing of two deliciously contrasted characters. Sir Pompey talks, Madame Juno talks, less, but not less delightfully .. . and it is enough. There is “Sea View,” already men tioned; there is the grim absurdity which “Saki” might have done better, but perhaps nobody else, about the surgeon who for the highest and purest motives murdered his Aunt Hetty, and then was so foolishly confidential as to tell her other nephews and nieces; there is the gay extravagance about Mr Puffinlow’s uncle, who knocked down the viaduct by shooting peas against it; there is the morbid monologue called “The Parasite” . There are 14 altogether, a mixed lot, an experimental lot, but a good lot*

Heart of Malaya. It is rarely that a man of long and efficient administrative experience in tropical jungles of the Empire possesses both the inseeing eye and the story-teller’s art. Sir Hugh Clifford, honoured for his service in Malaya and in West Africa, has them, and many readers appreciate the fact. Sir Hugh has drawn again on his deep knowledge of the East, and in a col.ection of 11 tales labelled “In Days That are Dead,” -he presents the lights and shadows of the white man’s life in Malaya. They are less of fiction than of fact, these stories of far places where values in manhood are resolved in a fierce heat. At least one story is wholly fact—the Dieuresque tale of the magnificent French nobleman who crowned himself King of the Sedangs, but died obscurely, greatly lamented —by his creditors. This is a book to keep and re-read. “In Days That are Dead.” Sir Hugh Clifford, G.C.M.G., G.B.E. John Murray. Our copy comes from Whitcoinbe and Tombs, Ltd. Seeking Adventure. Weymouth regarded adventure as a fine tonic, but his only excitement was in following the fortunes of heroes in books. He was a reader in a publisher’s office, he was jaded, and his soul craved the hot breath of a revolution, or the thrill of some bold emprise in out-of-the way places. So he thrust a pin into the pages of a gazeteer, the pin halted at Maranos; to Maranos he went. . . . G. P. Robinson, in the romantic comedy “Nadine,” tells how adventure in a dozen forms overtakes Weymouth. There is shabby work at all the cross-roads, revolution and action all the time. But the greatest adventure is Weymouth’s marriage to Nadine, who is a real princess. “Nadine.” G. P. Robinson. Duckworth. Our copy from the publisher’s Australian agents. The Channay Affair. “Prince of Story Tellers” he is called; but there might be added to his titles “Emperor of Invention.” Two novels a year are consistently sought from E. Phillips Oppenheim and as consistently turned out. The latest is the story of the Channay Syndicate. Vengeance fell sweetly to the hand of Mr Gilbert Channay, who had suffered twelve years of prison through the duplicity of his colleagues of the Syndicate. How he pursues them and exacts retribution makes a fast and thrilling story in the approved Oppenheim style. “The Channay Syndicate.” E. Phillips Oppenheim. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. Our copy comes from the publishers. A Sergeant in the Field Stories of the Great War will always find a public. Mr Leonard Nason’s “Chevrons” is not so much a war novel as a series of incidents drawn from the experiences of Sergeant Edie, who was proud of his wound stripes, but found that the most they earned for him from the fellows of his unit was “a lot of cheap conversation.” One gets an idea of soldiering from the ranker’s point of view, embellished with the crude yet graphic idiom of men who merely had to fight. There are pictures drawn of the horrors of an offensive that leave nothing to the imagination. But frequently the humorous side comes uppermost, and one hears again the language of the training camp and the trenches, always forceful, seldom polite. Mr Nason has a soldier’s vocabulary. “Chevrons.” Leonard H. Nason. Brentanos, Ltd., London. Our copy comes from the publishers. “Northward Bound” Notwithstanding that she has seen 41 summers, not to mention winters, and has reared three children before being plunged into widowhood, Maisie Dainton is seized with the spirit of adventure. She arranges for the welfare of her family and leaves England on a walking tour to Scotland—so that she may ruminate on the vagaries of a husband who lost his fortune in a last gamble before death. Maisie meets

a tramp—a most extraordinary fellow”. She is first attracted by his personality, then shocked by his unconventional views on morality and life. She finally marries him at Gretna Green, and finds she is wedded to a distinguished Scot, who has renounced his title. The strength of the story is its vivid characterisation of the tramp and his unmoral outlook on life and the personality of Maisie. Y “Northward Bound,” by Rosina Filipi. Cassell and Co., London. Our copy from Whitcombe and Tombs. A Woman Scorned “Her face was close to his and she leaned against him. Almost any other man would have taken her into his arms and kissed her; he knew this, but he could not. The smallest sign of surrender would have been fatal.” The *‘he’’ of this episode had well-moulded features that spoke of resolution and kindness. The “she” of the story had passionate orchid-like charm, and, oh! how she loathed the marble male. This introduces the principals in a conventional story which is generously loaded with exoticism. Still, those wdio find joy in stories of disordered love affairs will be entertained by this latest effort of a fertile writer.

“The Light That Lies,” Mrs. Victor Rickard; Hodder and Stoughten, London. Our copy direct from the publishers.

The influence of Einstein on “Affable Hawk”: “More interesting is Conrad’s confession that he could only describe well what had happened a long time afterwards.”