Old Mortality

THREE of our most distinguished poets today, one of them a veteran and assured of immortality (that is a safe prophecy), publish simul- taneously books of poems whose ineffable sadness makes the reader feel that surely here is a conspiracy to test the full bitterness of ex- perience in the search of a philosophy deeper than the bed-rock of despair. The Traveller is a narrative poem, but in the same way as The Faerie Queene is a narrative. It has no dramatic quest. The intensity is in the moment, not in the expectation. So the reader is -able, indeed compelled, at once to relapse into a full savouring of each phrase, each wave of rhythm, and each aspect of the heavy symbcilisth Whin -wEigh-r- like midnight on the whole poetii. The

"Each one to his private probable fate."

The poet's whole philosophy is loaded on that "probable." One had to read him always with that alertness, for he puts so much into a pzssing word or image.

His sense of the mutability of things is where he approaches nearest to Hardy.

"It is my life the river bears away

And all the temporal part of me." traveller—the human soul—is seen riding his horse—the human body?—across the weird and terrible landscape of desert earth. It is as though Quixote, bereft of his faithful Sancho, is removed to the heights of Central America, to a ghastly solitude which he determines to explore, upheld by one last asset—courage. He goes on until his steed fails him, and then comes—what? We are not told. But the last line hints of an "Inn at the cross roads, and the traveller's rest."

The poem is told in ballade form ; slow, Gray-like quatrains packed with images, and those magical syllables by which de la Mare's imagination works its will upon his reader, like the moon drawing the sea. Not only is the allegory of the poem Spenserian, but again and again one feels a Spenserian scene and atmosphere.

"Down, down into the abysm his mare, on hooves

Nimble as mountain-bred gazelle's, pricked on

From steep to steep, until through bouldered grooves And shallowing streams she trod, their safety won- " An Arab lean and sleek, her surf-like mane Tossed on a shoulder as of ivory made; Full in the moonrise she approached the plain, Was, with her master, in its beams arrayed."

The very use of the comma-pause, in that last line, is Spenserian. There is much to be discovered, in the revelation of the genius of de la Mare, by a study of his affinities with Spenser. Both are lunar poets, moving in a silver world entranced by fear, and love, of mid- night things. What marvellous use our contemporary makes of those experiences! How he translates them into art, the art latent in vowel and consonant! Look, for instance (or rather, listen) to these lines about the fungi which the Traveller saw.

"What tinier atomies of life were bred Beneath their skin-thin gills."

But I must not explore further in the cunning art of this poem. Enough to say that it has (again to quote it) "magic hidden in even the tiniest stone."

Mr. Rowse again shows himself unique as a poet. Somewhat akin to Hardy in temperament, he is to be likened to Edward Thomas in his prosodic devices. But at first the casual reader will pass him by, for here is an artist of deliberate determinations of rhythmic gesture and boldness of imagery. His personality soaks into every phrase, however, and gradually one sees how homogeneous is this verse, how full of distinction, and, finally, how beautiful both in spirit and form. Thit poet is always alert for the unknown element in life. Like de la Mare's traveller, he takes nothing on trust. The first poem in the book speaks of the several people whom the writer 'watches in a train, going That way of looking at life has been explored by the historian in him (a faculty which amounts to genius, one may say) and thus his appre- ciation of our old mortality is infinite in its variety. He can turn from small to great things and events, from a mollusc to a political oiganism, to present an example, a proof of his philosophy of eternal mutation, linked by the survival of human hope. And it is done in verse of a most extraordinary lucidity. One line will serve to show what I mean, and it will also symbolise how this poet gathers his material from experience.

"The yellow ragwort drains colour from the moon."

Think, too. what Wordsworthian clarity and depth lie in such a line (and it is a representative one) as "The evening light, candid and sad." I believe that this new collection will awaken a proper appre- cation of Mr. Rowse as a poet.

I do not always find Mr. Spender's poetry comprehensible. It is as though he looks upon the universe through eyes whose focus fluctuates. This results in intermittent clarity of image and stumbling of rhythm ; sometimes even in an inconsequence of poetic idea. Here is a stanza exhibiting all these faults :

"Orpheus, maker of music, Clasped his pale bride Upon that terrible river

Of the ghosts who have died.

Then of his poems, the uttermost Laurel sprang from his side."

Does he really mean that the ghosts died, or the mortals whom they overlap? Then I can make nothing of the last two lines ; that is, nothing positive in its poetic truth, that adds to the whole of the writer's identity and authority. There are passages too, where the movement of his verse becomes so disordered that the Shelley-like speed, so characteristic of Mr. Spender at his best, drops down like that of a spent meteor to be lost in a Rilke-like mist. When, how- ever, the poet is most himself, it is a self that creates something remarkably beautiful, as in such poems as The Dream, The Trance and Absence. In work such as this, he appears as a man musing in solitude, using as it were the undertones of thought without bothering to give them a final adult coherence and clarity. But their very vagueness is impressive (like a portrait by Carriere). Here is an example, verse of a high authority : "We fragments pulsing blood and breath,

Each separate in consciousness, reunite - In that dark journey to no place or date Where, naked beneath nakedness, beneath Our divided condition, all await The multitudinous loneliness of death,"

The fifty-one poems by Mary Webb consist mostly of unpublished fragments. They will add to the pleasure of those leaders who have hitherto enjoyed her work. The book is illustrated with wood engravings by Joan Hassall, work of such precise and imaginative beauty that it puts her into the same category as Stephen Gooden.

RICHARD CHURCH.