Poets Of The Soil

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 429, 10 August 1928, Page 14

Poets Of The Soil

[Written for The San.] SOMEBODY, Miss Margaret Sack-ville-West I think it was, has written a very long prize poem, listing in a poetic inventory all the things to be found on an English farm, from the smell of new cider to the hissing of grey geese. The was very kind about it, comparing it with “Piers Plowman.” Miss Edith Sitwell was very kind and patient and sardonic about it, writing a long critique where the sardonic flavour eventually mastered and murdered the kindness and patience. Since then there has been a dull, dead silence on the subject. All of which goes to prove that it isn’t so easy to be a poet after all.

Many English writers fall in love? with the idea of making their public fall in love with the brown soil of their country. They write down words like “dew” and “fairy rings” and “apple-orchard” and sometimes, for the sake of realism, “turnips.” Or, like Miss Sackville-West, they make a poetic inventory, omitting not one really useful farm product or implement; and they expect us, reading, to see the little farms, with all their orchard trees rocking in the moonlight. But, so far as I know, there is only one living writer who can really put the scent of the soil into her books—scent so strong that after the tenth page one is in Sussex, or in the Romney Marshes, or Kent; and that is Sheila Kaye-Smith.

I don’t know whether or not she is a great writer. I do know that her books have this curious power. One remembers the names of her characters —they don’t fade away into a sort of rainbow blur and become “that wonderful girl, in the remarkable book I read last year.” They are Joanna Godden, with the basket hat on her brown hair that Martin loved, or “Ben the Gorilla,” breathing his last of the conquered Sussex gorse, or Bob of “Green Apple Harvest,” watching the gipsy girl go by. Most of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s books, one takes it, were born in the middle of fairy rings on farm ? ng soil. Perhaps the most powerful is “Sussex Gorse,” whose men and women are so sternly alive —in particular the centra] figure. Ben —that one is smitten with a desire to seize them and talk reason to them. Ben is born in a waste, and with a dream. The golden Sussex gor3e flaunts past his window, like an outlaw girl who knows that the peasants are too poor and too much afraid to touch her. His farm stands on a few poor and barren acres. It becomes his through the explosion, indirectly his fault, which makes his brother. Beautiful Harry, blind and half-witted All good fortune comes to Ben: the farm, his mother’s love, the girl who should have been his brother’s wife But under the spell of his one ambition, to turn the acres of Sussex gorse into farming land, he ceases to be a man and becomes a farming implement. Rather worse, he demands that all in his power shall bend their backs and break their hearts for his purpose. Born to slavery, his children rebel against him and hate him. True romance, in the shape of Alice, “a liddle stick of a thing,” comes to him, and he passes it by when he smells the Linconquered Sussex gorse, through the window of her little room. He finishes his task, a lonely, terrible old man, warped out of any likeness to humanity, but unbroken. Here is a trait of Sheila KayeSmith’s, a little difficult to reconcile with the ordinary laws and conventions of novel writing. She gives us no peg on which we may hang our sympathies. We can understand the old farmer’s driving purpose, admire his power; but we cannot sympathise. He has spoiled the lives and broken the helplessness of too many. In the *nd, we are with the little army of the sacrificed, who would like to see him beaten and the golden gorse rolling hack, wave after wave, across his farmlands. ROBIN HYDE. Wellington.