A Quartet of Poets

Springboard, poems 1941-1944. By Louis MacNeice. (Faber and Faber. 6s.) Eros in Dogma. By George Barker. (Faber and Faber. 6s.)

APPARENTLY Mr. Eliot always intended the four poems, " Burnt Norton," "East Coker," " The Dry Salvages " and "Little Gidding,” to be read and judged as a single work and they are now pub- lished together for the first time. There is an underlying unity in theme and mood which explains this, but it is doubtful if the indivi- dual poems gain from thz enforced association. There is perhaps a cumulative splendour in their sombre melancholy, a heightened intensity in the anguished and recurrent irritation which breaks through all of them like a cri de coeur manqué. But there is also a sense of monotony and sterility where the intensity of thought or feeling wears thin in repetition. To those originally enthralled by the younger Eliot, his late writings have a frigidity and pomp which is difficult to assimilate: as a poet, always supremely self-conscious, he is now so acutely self-aware that expression—articulation even— is in danger of being inhibited altogether ; so that after a lyrical passage in the exciting short rhythm so especially associated with Eliot, the critical comment comes from the poet himself : "That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter."

Would the critic have dared say as much? The problems in these poems are philosophical problems. Time: the essential uni of past, present and future ; the failure of the spirit to keep tim with the body, of the body adequately to incorporate the spirit ; the discovery that age does not bring promised serenity but new anguish ; above all, the problem of expression:

" Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it."

These are not easy poems. They include a strange assortment of ideas and associated images ; only prolonged study could elucidate the real significance of some passages. Yet for all its subtlety of image and idea, the extreme fastidiousness and sensitivity of the intellect seem not to be matched in the emotions:

" The dripping blood our only drink The bloody flesh our only food,"

and only the supremely arrogant could so crave humility:

" The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

These four poems are written in a state of spiritual suspension in a period of waiting—waiting for a faith which has not come: " I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing ; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing ; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."

The nearest thing to Eliot's present style in contemporary writing is Virginia's Woolf's prose : "But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know."

Sometimes he falls into his own clichés ("The evening with the photograph album ") and succumbs to his own incantations.

Edmund Blunden speaks with a different voice. Quiet, gentle and sincere, he writes within the tradition of English contemplative and pastoral verse, making skilled use of rhymed stanza and poetic diction : " White willows play the music, .zephyrs bear Banners and colours through the tented air."

The best of these poems are the lyrics, such as the " Morning in March, 1943," " The Lost Name," " What is Winter? " I personally care less for the narrative and humorous verses, " The Unfortunate Shipmate," " Tigranes." His diction is sometimes conventional and banal:

"Fulfilment is a puzzling goddess And though her jewelled shrine Is so magnetic, we may tarry And ask, Is she divine? "

but sometimes used with free delight and mastery : "The sudden seraphical faultless host

Of bell-flowers where none pass, The blue sea frilling the sleepy coast, The gale in the sorrelled grass."

Mr. Louis MacNeice as a serious poet is astonishingly uneven. He has a distinct personal idiom, and where idea and expression are %%ell-matched, as in "Explorations," " The Conscript," "Nostalgia," there is a poem ; but often the expression proves totally inadequate to carry the poetic content, as in " Mutations " and " Brother Fire." There are the old Audenesque images, which no longer pull their weight : " The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,

The fuse is always laid to some annunciation" the slick, would-be-at-ease colloquialisms of " The Trolls," which are dismally unnatural and uneasy ; the Hyde-Park rant of :

" This is a bit like us: the individual sets

A course for all his soul's more basic needs. . . ." But who else today could write a ballad like "Whit Monday or " Swing Song "? Except, perhaps, Mr. Day Lewis. Who el- could so fail in. the same genre with "Nuts and May "? Exce, perhaps, Mr. Day Lewis. The most athbitious poem in this book " The Kingdom." It is of the kingdom of real individuals that h writes. In the introductory passage he describes his theme, a. there follows a series of portraits which, with the exception the "Mother," are sadly uninspiring. It is always harder to dra good than bad types, but need they have been so dull? What Browning's Men and Women or Crabbe's innumerable portraits? .

Mr. George Barker's new book of poems is a landmark, both his own work and in contemporary verse. The most remarkab immediate achievement is his command and use of languag Language and imagery are essentially our own, yet there are f jarring colloquialisms ; more than the choice of words is the ac handling of the language—which at its best is superb. Barker is course only extending Eliot's own poetic practice, but how differ they are as poets. There is a tenderness and humanity in the Thr Cycles of Love Poems which is not to be found anywhere in Eli. With the Love Poems, the Secular and Sacred Elegies form finest part of the book. The Pacific Sonnets are more variable ' quality—wonderful phrases, but few, I think, wholly successf poems. It is in this section that the temptation to startling co trast is sometimes given way to, with disastrous results to the poe (" 0 blood on the head and margarine in hand "). But this secti contains the remarkable Memorial Sonnets for two young seamen, which there are echoes of Hopkins but a lot that is only Barker: " At midday they looked up and saw their death

Standing up overhead as loud as thunder As white as angels and as broad as God."

George Barker is an outstanding poet, and this new book conta' magnificent poems. Essentially a lyric poet, he has more force a a greater sense of sin than is usually implied by that classification

SHEILA SHANNON.