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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 379, 27 September 1946, Page 14

DGAR ALLAN POE maintains in one of his essays that there is no such thing as a long poem, because the degree of elevating excitement which makes the value of a poem cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. "After a lapse of half-an-hour at the very utmost," he says, "it flags, fails, a revulsion ensues, and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer a poem." This is an evident exaggeration, but rightly stresses the extreme difficulty of writing a successful long poem, especially one upon so slight a theme as a garden. But Miss Sackville-West achieved the difficult in her long poem The Land, and she has done it a second time with The Garden. Apparently unsubstantial as her subjects are, she succeeds in getting an effect of beauty and dignity by letting her imagination dwell long and lovingly on subjects that please her; by "the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.’ Not that she always avoids the flagging line or passage. There are, in her new poem, linés as flat as this: "Yet do I find it difficult indeed." And there are, inevitably, periods of lapse and fatigue. But for the most part the reader is borne along very agreeably with the slow-moving thought, and frequently lifted to noble heights of enchanted vision. "These lines, these modest lines, almost demure" (to use the poet’s own words) ate at their best when describing flowers. Wallflowers Bronze as a pheasant, ruby as old wine Held up against the light Winter-sweet against a sheltering wall, Waxen, Chinese, and drooping bell. The peony "as blowsy as a strumpet," yellow lupins As full of honey as the laden bees Powdered with pollen on their Ethiop thighs. June roses, poppies, zinnias — all the flowers, common and uncommon, are here; the tiny creatures of the garden, too; the lady-bird "so neat in oval spotted carapace," and the snail "brittle as biscuit on the garden path." All are seen with-an eye more minutely observant than that of any other living English poet, except perhaps Andrew Young. The whole poem is an affectionate catalogue of garden pleasures enjoyed under the shadow of world catastrophe. The poet is no sentimental-ist-she is keenly awate (as in The Land) of the hostility as well as the friendliness of Nature, but can still find something to praise even in the marauding wasp, the "little Satan in his black and gold." For, she declares, "small pleasures must correct great tragedies." How fitly her fine workmanlike verse describes the homely skills and seasonal rites which make the prosperous garden

-waiting for the right weather, pruning, preparing the soil, sowing; then the rewards when \ Come crowding all the chaste And adolescent children of the Spring. The Garden is an unassuming work, but aliveness in poetry is an incalculable thing, and a few lines about a gooseberry tart may endure longer than many a portentous' Ode to the Universe. And so I venture a prophecy that this poem, and \ its companion The Land, with their satisfying plainness, will outlast the smart and complicated fashion of much modern verse. But be this as it may, we can be thankful for the poet’s calm insistence on simple, natural things and feelings in these bad times, and her comforting reminder that these (as Hardy wrote) s+ + +++» Will go onwatd the same Though Dynasties pass.