THE POEMS OF THOMAS GORDON HAKE.*

A GREAT many readers of poetry will probably make acquaint- ance with Dr. Hake for the first time in this volume of Selections, and hear with surprise that their author is already eighty-five years of age, and has sent out various books of poetry, of which the earliest was issued when he was thirty and the latest four years ago. Mrs. Meynell, in her prefatory note, tells us that he has " a solemn and distinct note, little confusable with the other notes of the concerted song of poets." A solemn note no doubt he generally has ; sometimes,

too, a distinct, sometimes a very indistinct note,—at least if the word "distinct" be used in the usual sense of distinguish- able from other notes, and easily apprehensible by the reader. There is no echo of any other poet, except, now and then, Wordsworth, in Dr. Hake's verse. So far, his note is dis- tinct enough ; but it is not always clear what his drift and meaning, or even his own attitude of mind, is ; and in these not at all rare cases, he is decidedly indistinct. There are poems in this volume of Selections which ring nearly as clear from the first line to the last, as a poem could ring,—for instance, " The Cripple," " The Blind Boy," " The Snake-Charmer,"—but even though this little volume is small, and is selected from many others, such poems are certainly hardly half of the whole. Take, for an example of a certain apparently deliberate indistinctness, the little poem, not wanting in music, " When I think of thee, brother " :—

" When I think of thee, brother,

Is my heart not all thine ?

Yet the face of another Seems bending o'er mine.

I call thee by name, yet a name not thy own Has whispered already its dear undertone.

When I think thine eyes greet me, Their sweet flash of blue Brings another's to meet me Of somberer hue ; And ever before me they seem to remain Though my heart but repines to behold thee again.

When I list, and would hear thee Once more in our home, And thy voice appears near me, Another's has come.

I dream of thee only, for thee only sigh, Yet thy image forsakes me ; another's is nigh.

VF hen thy fond smiles come o'er me,

As in moments now flown, There riseth before me A look not thy own : 'Tis thee I recall to my mind, 0 my brother !

Yet ever with thine comes the gaze of another."

Now that is, we suppose, intended to indicate that the obtruding image, though it has a tender fascination of its own, would be banished if the poet's will had full

command over the train of hie associations. But if so, what could be a more unfortunate error than the use of the word " repines," in the second verse, used in the sense, we suppose, of " pines," though it has a nearly opposite meaning? What you repine to behold, you regret to behold ; what you pine to behold, you long to behold. The poet evi- dently intends to say that he longs only for his brother's face ; but what he does say is that he only frets at beholding it. " The Deadly Nightshade," again, has a considerable number of lamenesses of the same kind. It is said for instance of the frequenters of a den of thieves and harlots, that "Death on all has set his stare, to drag them forth, to grasp their spoil," the precise meaning of which is very indistinct indeed, though of course it implies that they do not enjoy that spoil ; but does it mean that death steals the spoil from them, or steals them from the spoil? In words, apparently the former, but in meaning we suppose the latter. The picture of the shameless woman dragging about a miserable child for the gains she can make by the spectacle of its misery, and spend-

ing all she gains in a sort of fury of intemperance, is very vigorous :—

• The Poems of Thomas Gordon Hake. Selected, with a Prefatory Note, by Alice Meynell; and a Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Elkin Mathews sad John Lane. 1894.

" The child is taught through many a blow To shed with sobs the beggar's tear, Reared as a prodigy of woe That gentle women pay to hear. And many listened and bestowed ; For younger tears had never flowed.

Held at his mother's band, he hung A broken spray with misery's drip ; And often to the ground he clung, His passion bursting at his lip.

And still she dragged him o'er the stones, Though tender was he to the bones.

Her eyes of prey like fangs were laid On all who gave a hurried look, And while she whined for kindly aid, She hid away the coin she took, When suddenly she begged no more And rushed within a slamming door.

With nostrils spread, and eyes aflame, Before the shrine of death she stands, The infant by her, sick and lame, The lava trembling in her hands. She drinks it with a vengeful frown ; She feels the fiend of sorrow drown."

But the child runs away from his mother, and lives appar- ently a harmless, though hunted and bewildered, life, of which Dr. Hake gives us a sketch which ends abruptly and very inartistically in a kind of dull anti-climax. Here is the conclusion :-

"Then comes the child, this ill-sown seed,

To sweep the purlieus and the wynds, But few bethink them of his need, And scanty is the help he finds. At times he walks upon his head: A form of prayer for daily bread.

Now seem his days for sorrow made !

He hears that men on Sunday pray ; A world's proud secret on parade To him appears the Sabbath-day.

All have asked heaven to take their cares, But hunger says for him his prayers.

Some words have reached him such as jar On sinners' ears and seem devout ; They are but as a light from far, They come from heaven and soon die out,

Too weak as yet to turn a spell Wove in the alphabet of hell."

Nothing could be better than "At times he walks upon his head : A form of prayer for daily bread ; " nor anything much better than the verse which follows it, as to the spectacle which the British Sabbath presents to such a child as this. But what an abrupt and inadequate conclusion ! We sup- pose that Dr. Hake uses the word "turn" in the sense of turn aside, foil, or counteract, but that is a very unusual use for it. Few readers will guess its meaning till after puzzled consideration. At first, we took "turn" in the sense in which it is used in the idiom, " turn a penny," and were utterly bewildered. This is the fashion in which Dr. Hake too frequently breaks down, and it explains, we suppose, the comparative unpopularity of his poems. Mrs Meynell says that " Dr. Hake's expression always implies long intention, deliberate decision. The verse is a consequence long foreseen." We should have said that it does so at its best, but that at its worst it suggests a mind tired of its subject, and breaking off with a sort of sudden collapse. Again, we cannot agree with Mrs. Meynell that Dr. Hake's note is always one of an " exceeding solemnity." Sometimes, no doubt, it is so. But that solemnity is often qualified by a great love of the bizarre. We may observe this in the pathos and humour of the verses we have already quoted from the poem describing

the poor little waif whose walking on his head is " a form of prayer for daily bread." Only there the bizarrerie of the thought is absolutely appropriate to the dreary pathos of the subject. But in other poems, of which " Old Souls " is much the most remarkable, the bizarrerie is purely capricious, and not in the least suggested by the objective bizarrerie of human life. The poet represents our Lord as a tinker who goes about droning out, " Old souls to mend ! " There is, no doubt, a bizarre solemnity in the poem ; but it is a solemnity which jars instead of impressing us. Take, for instance, the fol- lowing specimen :- " One stops and says, This soul of mine

Has been a tidy piece of ware, But rust and rot in it combine,

And now corruption lays it bare. Give it a look : there was a day

When it the morning hymn could say.'

The tinker looks into his eye, And there detects besetting sin, The decent old-established lie, That creeps through all the chinks within. Lank are its tendrils, thick its shoots, And like a worm's nest coil the roots.

Like flowers that deadly berries bear, His seed, if tended from the pod, Had grown in beauty with the year, Like deodora drawn to God ; Now like a dank and curly brake, It fosters venom for the snake.

The tinker takes the weed in tow, And roots it out with tooth and nail ; His labour patient to bestow, Lest like the herd of men he fail. How best to extirpate the weed, Has grown with him into a creed.

His tack is steady, slow, and sure : He plucks it out despite the howl, With gentle band and look demure, As cunning maiden draws a fowl. He knows the job he is about, And pulls till all the lie is out.

'Now steadfastly regard the man Who wrought your cure of rust and rot !

You saw him ere the work began : Is he the same, or is he not?

You saw the tinker ; now behold The Envoy of a God of old.'

This said, he on the forehead stamps A downward stroke and one across, Then straight upon his way he tramps ; His time for profit, not for loss ; His task no sooner at an end Then out he cries, Old souls to mend!' "

To liken the inwardness of our Lord's method of dealing with sin to the cunning hand with which a maiden draws a fowl, can hardly be said to answer any purpose except the fixing of attention by its supreme and grotesque unsuitability to the subject with which the poet is dealing. And to asso- ciate deliberately the crown of thorns with a coat of " rusty velveteen" worn by a tinker, is a needless and wanton parody on the seamless garment for which the soldiers cast lots :—

" He is the humble, lowly one,

In coat of rusty velveteen, Who to his daily work has gone ; In sleeves of lawn not ever seen. No mitre on his forehead sticks : His crown is thorny, and it pricks."

But the bizarrerie of the comparison enters even more deeply into the thought of the poet than it enters into its

imagery. In one verse, Dr. Hake seems to suggest that the cry of Christ to the soul, though, as he very finely says, it sends "thrills along eternity," yet gains no ear from the multi- tude because they cannot lend ear "to him who from old habit speaks." We suppose that is only meant to express the

world's false impression of Christ's offer of redemption ; but if so, it was a pity not to say so, for the whole drift of this strange poem is to delineate the dull monotony of Christ's call

to the multitude, as if it really simulated the routine of mechanical habit except when it falls on the ears of those who are already penitent. That can hardly be Dr. Hake's meaning, but his love of the bizarre has betrayed him into so representing it.

There are, however, several of these poems in which the pathos and passion penetrate the whole, as, for example, the

beautiful first poem called " Alone ; " or "Ecce Homo !" in which blind Bartimants is represented as having a vision of Christ's life and death at the moment in which his eyes are opened; or "The Lily of the Valley." Others of these poems are spoiled by their obscurity, like " The Shepherdess," in

which the narrative is very hazy; or "Pythagoras," in which the Pythagorean doctrine is shadowed forth ineffec- tually, as in a sort of dream after death. Dr. Hake shows great though very discontinuous power; but the last thing we should be disposed to say of him is that his verse " always implies long intention, deliberate decision," unless his " long intention" be conceived sometimes as irremediably faulty, and his " deliberate decision " as not unfrequently deliberately obscure.