MR. HARDY'S LATER POEMS.*

IN this volume Mr. Hardy has collected the poems written for the most part in the last five years or so, a considerable number of which have been published separately. As they are the utterances of a man of seventy suffering from a recent • Satires of Cireurnstane, Lrria Rawlins, wen Miseelloiteene Ity Thomas nerdy. London Knemillanal nd Co. I4e. Id. net.]

bereavement, it is not to be wondered at that the prevailing tone should be autumnal and elegiac. It is only on the last two pages of the volume, in the song of the soldiers, " Men who march away," that the note of hopefulness revives :—

"In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just, And that braggarts must Surely bite the dust,

Press we to the Said ungrieving In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just.

Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, To hazards whence no tears can win us, Hence the faith and fire within us, Men who march away."

Elsewhere in the volume we look in vain for evidences of "faith and fire "—save the embers of the past. There is a vein of tender regret in the group of poems dated 1912-1913 under the motto Yeteris vestigin 'famine, but it is shot through with bitterness The scenes and pleasures of the past have not lost their savour, but they are always contrasted with the barrenness of the present to one " to whom to-day is beneaped and stale, and its urgent clack but a vapid tale," whose "sand is sinking," and who will "traverse love's domain never again." The word "nevermore" sounds like a sombre ground bass throughout the book. Love can supply "one note" to the "one long sweeping symphony from times remote till now, of human tenderness ... as part of sick Life's antidote," but it is "small and untraced," and the burden of these poems is the sickness rather than the soundness of life. The lovers of whom Mr. Hardy singe are mostly those gross durus Amor crudeli labs pee-edit, for whom the eternal question was "by whose strange laws That which mattered moat could not be." His past is haunted by "spectres that grieve," " slighted visitants," like the wife whose grave is only visited by her pet dog, not out of fidelity, but simply to bury a bone in case it should be hungry near the spot, Women as portrayed in these dismal and sardonic "satires of circumstance" are either frail or forced into loveless marriages. Their husbands are either befooled, or brutalized by their awakening to the truth. In about half a dozen poems the awakening comes about by the wife'e confession, and leads to estrangement, misery, or vengeance. Or, as a variant, we have the enlighten- ment of a week-old husband by overhearing scraps of con- versation at a "lively liquor bar," with the gruesome sequel :— " That night them was the splash of a fall Over the slimy harbour-wall:

They searched, and at the deepest place Found him with crabs upon his face."

It is a relief to turn from these sinister studies of married wretchedness to such a tribute as that which Mr. Hardy pays in sonnet form to the memory of Leslie Stephen :—

"Tux Senascximmr.

Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;

Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams Upon my nearing vision, less it seems A looming Alp-height than a guise of him Who sealed its horn with ventured life and limb, Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe, Of semblance to his personality In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,

Will he, in old love, hitherward escape, And the eternal essence of his mind Enter this silent adamantine shape, And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose ?"

The homage to Swinbnrne, "A Singer Asleep," is more unequal in execution, hnt has some fine stanzas :— " —It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of some smog nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, In faith of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria's formal middle time His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.

—His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies ;

Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep

Into the rambling world-encircling deep Which hides her where none sees."

The lines on the loss of the ' Titanic,' " The Convergence of

the Twain"—the great liner and her "sinister mate" the ice-

berg—have a curious interest apart from their intrinsic merit, because they express with a condensed force charac- teristic of the writer the same idea which inspired a poem on similar lines written many years ago by an American author.

As an example of Mr. Hardy in the mellower vein of elegy, we may quote the beautiful lines "Regret not me," which the curious student of contrasts may compare with a famous lyric; by Christina Rossetti :—

" Regret not for me ;

Beneath the sunny tree I lie uncaring, slumbering peacefully.

Swift as the light I flew my faery flight; Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

I did not know That heydays fade and go, But deemed that what was would be always so.

I skipped at morn Between the yellowing corn, Thinking it good and glorious to be born.

I ran at eves Among the piled-up sheaves,

Dreaming grieve not, therefore nothing grieves.'

Now soon will come The apple, pear, and plum

And hives will sing, and autumn insects hum.

Again you will fare To cider-makings rare, And jankotings ; but I shall not be there.

Yet gaily sing Until the pewter ring

Those songs we sang when we went gipsying.

And lightly dance

Some triple-timed romance In coupled figures, and forget mischance;

And mourn not me Beneath the yellowing tree ; For I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully."

There are many other poems which call for notice : macabre and cadaverous imaginings such as the musings of the skeletons in a church on the Channel coast or of the dead Kings at Westminster at the Coronation ; or the modernized version of Peter's interview with the guards before the cock crew, which produces an effect akin to that of some modern French pictures ; or the strange fantasy entitled "God's Funeral," in which the shattering of faith is described in a parable by one whose unbelief is no source of arrogance or intellectual pride. He pictures the long procession of dis- illusioned mourners following the bier, and ends on a note of perplexity :— "I could not prop their faith and yet

Many I had known: with all I sympathized; And though struck speechless, I did not forget That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

Still, how to bear such loss I deemed The insistent question for each animate mind, And gazing, to my growing eight there seemed A pale yet positive gleam low down behind, Whereof, to lift the general night, A certain few who stood aloof had said, ' See you upon the horizon that small light-

€ welling somewhat f ' Each mourner shook his head.

And they composed a crowd of whom Some were right good, and many nigh the best.. . Thus dazed and puzzled 'twist the gleam and gloom Mechanically I followed with the rest."

Viewed in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, Mr. Hardy is a strangely isolated figure. His poetry is eminently his own, but it isnot "a poor thing." He " standeth alone," but not "as the nightingale sings," for the element of charm and melody is so intermittent as to be negligible. His technique is often halting and clumsy and his style lacking in distinction. One encounters stretches of prose twisted into lengths of verse, ponderous Latin polysyllables, journalistic: epithets such as "insistent," ugly forms such as " boundenly." His handling of rhythm and rhyme suggests a stubborn conquest rather than an easy victory. Yet he has at least thin justification for adopting the medium of verse, that be says what he means with a force and concen- tration unattainable in prose. He is not a singer, or a consoler, or a prophet ; he stands with his back to the future, immersed in tragic retrospect, directing with an unerring

Rim the searchlight of his sombre genius on the "soul-sick blight" of poor humanity "struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."