Promise and Fulfilment
Windus. as.) -
First Poems. By Betty Ask-with. (Martin Seeker. Ss. 6d.) WE must suppose that both Mr. Harold Monro and Mr. Edmund Blunden have now fulfilled their poetic destinies. They may go on writing poetry for a long time yet, but there is no mistaking the courses these two poets are shaping. It is as though the light airs of fancy which blow the young poet's barque along—to the Hesperides, or to some more definable island harbour—had now given place to the steady trade winds of imagination.
Mr. Monro, indeed, was on a known course years ago ; it did not seem at all likely that he would surprise us by turning off it. Nor has he done so. The only difference is that all his images are now mellowed by a - more dearly bought knowledge of their impermanence. This is not a book from which one can quote with fairness to the poet, but those who know and like Mr. Monro's earlier work may be assured that they will not be disappointed.
We are not entirely certain that the same can be said of Retreat. Mr. Blunden, returning after exile to the English scenes he loved and painted so well, wanted very much to find them the same :—
" From school the hungry youngsters rushed,
The caravan passed, the mill sluice gushed. Dear,' I answered, all my ways led here.'"
He is refuting the village's complaint that it is not good enough for him now—" look, how small and poor I lie." So, in other poems does he challenge, if not so openly, the suggestion that he has altered, or sees things with a different eye, and the result of this rather desperate attitude is that many of the sweet spontaneous notes which made us turn to The Shepherd as the most promising work of any young post- War poet are inevitably sacrificed. Mr. Blunden is essentially honest in his use of words : every verse he writes shows the mind of a poet wrestling to get at the exact truth of what is seen. This is an admirable quality. But it is a pity when, as in some of these poems, his preoccupation with detail, coupled with the evident fear of losing what once was his, destroys the melody and makes the sense difficult. We do not want to be so constantly reminded of the poet's integrity, and scholarship : that art which conceals art is the greater.
Mr. Morley's Toulemonde, the story—if it can be called a story—of a poet who lives, isolated from the material world, at the top of a New York skyscraper, "fighting with his words," and hearing "chipmunks dancing in the wall," ig a captivating piece of semi-satirical writing. A note of, civilization-mockery runs all the way through it ; for Toulemonde, "who made himself a motley to the view," was not concerned with the things that the people round and below him thought important—he saw things differently; and yet (ironic, pathetic Toulemonde!) he found poetry and surpassing beauty in their very works, which they only knew as civilization :— " So in this town (says Toulemonde) Where men up-end their poetry on sky, Flash It in chains of crawling yellow cars Round elevated curves on rainy_ nights, No wonder the mere poet lags behind."
Mr. Christopher Morley is a master of the fantastic in verse ; and many of his lines gain an added loveliness from an almost casual method of approach. • Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner, the novelist, writes verse in a smooth and selfeonsciously educated manner. She has a remarkable skill of technique, and when she is not evolving such extraordinary lines as "And lovingly lengthening such sheltering joy shed into my soul," she can write with a peculiar and lucid charm of country things.
Miss Betty Askwith has scarcely enough poems as yet to justify a book : it would have been better to have waited for perhaps a year, when some of the rather too youthful early verses could have given place to later work. There is, however, a freshness and genuine poetic quality about " Colours " and " Vers_ Libre" which suggest that she will some day achieve a distinct genre of her own.
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