Books of the Day

English Religious Verse

The Oxford Book of Christian Verse. Chosen and edited by Lord David Cecil. (Oxford University Press. 8s. 6d.) LORD DAVID CECIL. in an admirable introduction to this collec- tion, gives some reasons why religious poetry has not, as a rule, and with many magnificent exceptions, been the best poetry. Chief among these, probably, is the difficulty of finding new and living symbols for a body of experience so guarded and hallowed by traditional orthodox expression that those most affected by it are often the least inclined to break new ground. More, devotional expression wears easily a cheap look, slipping into an over-lush emotionalism, even eroticism, on the one hand, a ponderous and chilly didacticism on the other; a distressing tone of familiarity lies in wait for it, a kind of Carlo Dolci softness, an embarrassing abasement, or a prosy discursiveness on those wingy mysteries of divinity which Dr. Johnson and many others have thought " too ponderous for the wings of wit." When treated neither ponderously nor sentimentally, the wingy mysteries have been apt to be twisted and fantasticated into un- reality—" the more we trace the Trinity, the more we fall in fantasy," as a fourteenth century poet observed. Anyhow, and for whatever reasons, religious poetry has always been an un- certain, too often a discouraging, affair. Yet among the much chaff in this sort that litters the centuries there have pushed up always plants so fresh, green and lovely as to wear an ageless bloom. From our own earliest experiments in Christian verse we are most of us barred by language; it is no use setting before us Early English, or even the earlier periods of Middle English, verse, unmodernised. But the loss of these seven centuries is so serious that it seems a pity that anthologists should not

modernise or translate their best things. There is an unrepeated beauty about some of our early religious verse, both in the great Northumbrian period, when the mysteries of Latin Christianity were first settling themselves into the melancholy, misty wild- ness of the English temper and weather, and in the later

mediaeval centuries, so full of lovely, mostly anonymous, devo- tional lyrics and carols, some of which, but too few, find place here. They should, I think, in a general anthology, all be modernised in text; if they retain Middle English spelling their beauty is lost to too many readers. Some in this collection are modernised, but rather randomly, and not always where most needed. Why, for example, not make Dunbar as easy as the Lyke Wake Dirge is made? " The yettis of hell are brokin

with a crak " only puzzles and annoys the ignorant. The seventeenth century poets, on the other hand, who are modern- ised, do not really need it, though it is probably a good general rule, and the only modernisation that seems a mistake is the in- trusion of the devout but horrid capital H.

The exquisite charm of the early periods could not last, after faith stepped out of its moving youth; but, as Lord David Cecil says, the all-round tremendousness of the sixteenth century included some great religious poetry: practically all men of letters wrote a little devotional verse, even the more worldly expressing thus their periodic fits of repentance for their nor- mally irreligious lives. The century is beautifully, but might perhaps have been more plentifully, represented ; Shakespeare has only the 146th sonnet, and there is no Wyatt, Surrey, Vaux, Peele, Greene, Drayton or Sylvester. If the task of selection was difficult here, it must have been more so in the next century, when practically all the Anglican clergy, most other ministers and priests, and large numbers of the lettered laity, weighed in with contributions of varying but often startling quality. To this magnificent devotional period Lord David Cecil does admirable justice: generous justice, too, for he allows

Waller's rather Ciceronian than specifically Christian Last Verses. Turning these pages from Donne (excellently chosen)

to Herrick, from Herrick to Milton, from Milton to Crashaw, Marvell, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Dryden, reading the grave and charming quiddities of the delightful Quarles, the solemnities of Henry More, Habington, Joseph Beaumont, the lovely anonymous Jerusalem with which the century opens, Bishop Ken's manly commands to his soul which close it, and the galaxy of smaller stars which stand about these, one is charmed by the infinite variousness of the religious mind and voice of man.

One enters in the next century a country of more pedestrian plains. Religious verse tended to swing between a rather smug commendation of the Deity for having made such fine land- scapes and so many stars of such regular habits, and a fervent and sanguinary evangelical emotionalism. Into all this the mad Smart and the mystical Blake break with refreshing oddity. But, as Lord David says, there was not another great age of religious poetry until the Victorian. Here he is an excellent guide, and gives the best of Hopkins, Browning, Patmore and Christina Rossetti. No Clough, which is

unusual: and surely Laurence Housman, with his magnificent Spikenard, should adorn the 'nineties? But space was no doubt limited.

The present poetic age is not religious, though Mr. T. S. Eliot has brought to Anglican Christianity all the force of his imaginative imagery and subtle intelligence. The fact that Lord David Cecil admires Mr. Eliot and yet appreciates also so many

of his opposites, applying a fastidious yet catholic literary taste and culture to the field he surveys, makes him an excellent editor for such a selection as this, and-gives the selection fine quality. It was perhaps a pity to end with Bridges; but I can- not judge of this, for the Testament of Beauty happens to be outside my appreciation. A better close to a religious anthology of today would be T. S. Eliot's lines: Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children

When the time of sorrow is come?

They will take to the goat's path and the fox's home, Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords. Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation Grant us thy peace.

With perhaps a tail-piece from The Rock,

And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.

ROSE MACAULAY.