New Verse
Poems, 1953. By Robert Graves. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.) 0 Lovely England. By Walter de la Mare. (Faber. 10s. 6d.) INCREASINGLY, as one reads the work of contemporary poets under the age of forty, one becomes conscious of how much of their work is occasional in the strict sense of the word. They have had an idea and they are going to write a poem about it, or they have fallen in love and they are going to write a poem about it. Of course, they are within their rights : sonnets to a mistress's left eyebrow are well within the tradition of English poetry. Only this kind of picaresque poetry singularly fails to add np to anything. The poet wanders from object to object, the only connection between them being the purely temporal thread of his own life. His experience moulds his poetry, though it should be the other way round. No image is sufficiently felt by him for any consistency in the use of images to be attained. In short, he fails to create a poetic world, and for a poet it is that or nothing. There is an immense gulf fixed between the production of individual poems and what the French call une oeuvre, and it is a gulf which few of our younger poets look like crossing.
Robert Graves, of course, crossed it long ago. His latest poems are so good, individually that their relationship to each other and to the rest of Mr. Graves's work might be missed. But here we are always in the same universe of angry, ironic sensuality, which sometimes recalls Yeats, while lacking the mad, obsessive ring of his last poems : " Give me four hundred years, or five—
Can rage be so intense ?-
And I will sweat them out alive To prove my impenitence."
The affective word is sweat, contrasting, as it does, with the abstract, theological impenitence in the next line. This is really Mr. Graves's secret. His irony comes from a scholarly sense of history put up against the fierce lusts and rages with which that history is filled. The concrete day-to-day event is judged against the more abstract millenium-to-millenium pattern of things. In 'The Sacred Mission' we are faced with twenty loudspeakers, twenty lovesick voices—and these are the instruments of Christian propaganda—roaring the message of Christ's limitless love. Contrast and irony again : the secular Christian ideal versus its particular manifestation. In his love poems— and Mr. Graves has written te best love poems of our epoch—the method is the same. The ironftomes from the poet's foreknowledge of the pattern. The magnificently' gnarled poem With Her Lips Only puts the clash in a dramatic form. The wife will not give way to her lover because of her children. She will equally respond to her husband because of her children. This is doing her duty and it is noble. But the poet knows that it is not all : " For the children's sake,' she argues with her conscience, For the children '—turning suddenly cold towards them."
The vast experience of the poet, looking on at this scene, produces the irony. And the irony is real, implicit in every attitude, every verse of these poems. Mr. Graves's universe is perhaps a wry one but he remains the most consistently worth-reading of any poet writing in English. Walter de la Mare has made his private world too. Only it is narrower than that of Mr. Graves, embracing that portion of human experience contained within the boundaries of waking dream. His latest volume darkens a few more shadows, shows up a few more half-lights, but otherwise does not change anything. It is difficult to say anything relevant about Mr. de la Mare's poetry—I don't know that anyorie has ever said anything relevant about it. All that can be done is to analyse the immense technical skill : " Then what far peace, to me unknown,
Seems by that gently lipping wave, That shrouded tree, to brood upon, Unless the grave ?
It is obvious that it is the short last line that does the trick, that the use of lipping in the second line provides a slight shock together with a (perhaps delusive) onomatopoeic effect, that the pause in the third line corresponds to the pause in the first, and so forth. What is difficult is to do it.
The two older poets have created worlds of their own. Is this true of the younger ones? Both. D. J. Enright and Douglas Le Pan are Mediterranean poets, Mr. Enright specialising in ironic description of the Levantine world and Mr. Le Pan evoking elegiac memories of his campaigning in Italy. Mr. Enright, however, is a distinct sufferer from dispersion. He can observe, but his irony is too often merely verbal—that of the intellectual on the loose—and his poetry lacks dynamic power. It would be better if he were not so knowing : " They mention you often- ' Our T. S. Eliot '—and write unpublished essays on you." This is about Gay*, who has, I imagine, influenced Mr. Enright's style, but surely this kind of thing is both flat and out-dated Mr. Enright might have been more ruthless : most of these poems in my opinion would be the better for cutting. Mr. Le Pan is also rather verbose, but makes up for it by genuine spurts of passion. Sometimes he is careless—he rhymes condottier and air—but generally is well up to what might be called Eighth Army standards. His work, which should be compared with that of other members of the small group of poets operating in the same area during the war, has a certain descriptive unity. And he can manage great directness of attack : " And He, grown proud,
Among the sun's bright retinue would die,
Whose care is how they fall, not why." As poetry this seems to stand comparison with anything that came out of the last war.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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