Pale Ghost
IT is scarcely conceivable that the poets of the 'nineties will ever find readers again; not because of their sordid lives, their sexual perversions, their drink, their religious attitudinising, but because of the sheer poverty of their writing. Lionel Johnson was probably the most gifted of the group who contributed to the Yellow Book and the Savoy. He was a classical scholar, a master of verse-forms both in English and Latin, a dedicated poet. Yet this volume, in which all his surviving poems have been scrupulously collected, con- tains hardly a memorable line, scarcely a striking image, seldom an entire verse with an emotional temperature above luke'tarm. Places he visited, friends, enthusiasm for Celtic causes, religious occasions and historical subjects are all celebrated according to the same tired formula.
" Then down the lone moors let each wind
Cry round the silent house of sleep : And there let breaths of heather find Entrance, and there the fresh rains weep.
Rest I rest 1 The storm hath surged away : The calm, the hush, the dews, descend. Rest now, ah, rest thee 1 night and day : The circling moorlands guard their friend."
Is this addressed by the poet to himself, or to some fellow decadent? No, it is the "royal sisters of the North" who are apostrophised, in the singular, Charlotte and Emily Bronte considered as an inseparable pair. Similarly Johnson seems unable to discriminate between Wales and Ireland, echoes Arnold, Yeats or Thompson indifferently. Always, whatever his subject, he combines the expected words in the familiar patterns. Lone, passionate, purple, sighing, grief, desire : they belong to the decade ; they are not even his personal vocabulary. In every poem there is the same descending rhythm, the same tired endings to the lines. Always incantation, the dull repeti- tion of a would-be evocative word, is expected to take the place of vision.
Iain Fletcher makes no attempt to claim for the poet more than his poor due. lie does fail to make the point, however, that in his sober and more adult moments—in the hitherto uncollected poem "Sad Morality," for instance—Johnson had a pleasing sense of fun. But the tale of his life was one of progressive retreat from experience, of growing impoverishment of the imagination. So the three or four poems that find their way into anthologies represent him, on the whole, more kindly than this collected edition. J. M. COHEN.
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