Glimpses of Post- War English Poetry

Glimpses of

Post- War English Poetry

In a world enveloped in the mists of materialism, the soul-uplifting melodies of song and poem, the entrancing transport of verse laden with the beauty of form and rhythm, are at a discount. But all the same, the world has not become a dry desert where the verdant growth of poetry is altogether absent. There are poets and those who read them–poets whose souls rise above the noise of mortal earth and sing in accord with the music of the stars. There are yet people that are subject to the transitory fits of poetic susceptibility, entranced with the music of verse, the sublimity of higher thought. There are still other poets, even if they are not flourishing, yet existing and adjusting their inspiration to the environment and dressing their thought to suit the fashion of the day. There have thus arisen two types of poetry–the mystic and the materialistic, or the imaginative and the realistic–the former, entirely transcending the earth and the mustiness that encrusts it and purely of a subjective and spiritual kind, more self-absorbing and less popular, less intelligible to the ordinary man, more concerned with what is invisible, far and unrealisable; the latter, of a kind that touches man at all ends and stills his appetite, pleasant, light, accessible, based on observation set in poetic atmosphere, appealing to the man in the street, less taxing. The pre-war and the post-war poetry of the British Empire is essentially of this kind.

Helena Colman, the Canadian poet whose "Marching men: war verses" has the measured march of war-roused men is a typical example of a poet whose inspiration was the devastating war and whose verses tossed the feelings of the Canadians in a whirl of patriotism:

The fields are green in Canada
And bloom is on the bough,
And orchards by the farm-house
Are just a glory now;
The thorn trees by the fences
The lilacs by the door
Seem more intent on blooming than
They ever did before;
But there are eyes in Canada
That cannot see for tears,
And there are hearts in Canada
Grown weary with their fears;
The resting birds of Canada
They pipe to deafened ears.

Here is a whole country depicted with exquisite charm in jeweled phrases –a striking contrast of vernal bloom and battle-blight. The realism that was so significantly absent in Victorian poetry, obsessed by its Romanticism, is the true characteristic of post-war poetry. It appears in all its stark nakedness, in all its bewitching bluntness and has a charm of its own apart from the mystic etherealisation that has endeared itself to not a few and is fast recruiting strength to itself.

Padriac Colum, the Irish poet and dramatist, in his "Wild earth" depicts a people and a land that through long ages of foreign domination has preserved unsullied its nationalism with "barbaric" steadfastness:

"Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage; earth broken,

Beside him two horses–, a plough."

A picture more true to life cannot be drawn. We see before us the Irish ploughman with ages of unsophisticated past as his ground and ages of unploughed future in the horizon, a type of the farmer that Ireland has bred and will breed.

William Henry Davies, in the words of St. John Adcock, has found in the hardships and careless freedom of his town and country wanderings inspiration for some of the most starkly realistic and exquisite flower-like lyrics and ballads in the language. His songs sing themselves and have the beautiful simplicity of "unpremeditated art." No higher praise can be given to him. Here is a stanza from his "Kingfisher:"

It was the rainbow gave thee birth
And left thee all her lovely hues,
And as her mother's name was tears
So runs it in thy blood to choose
For haunts the lovely pools and keep
In company with trees that weep.

Walter De La Mare is another of the Poets that is always fond, it is said, of moving in a world of real men and Women and is not enamored of elves and fairies and angels and ghosts and gnomes. He is sometimes as eerie as Poe and sometimes as quaintly fantastic as Lamb and often blends the qualities of both. Addressing England, the poet sings:

These are the woods whereto my soul
Out of the noontide beam
Flees for a refuge green and cool
And tranquil as a dream.

In "The Sleeper," the beautiful quaintness and pleasant airiness of his verse and thought are visible:

On Anne; as quiet, quiet still she stood
Yet slumber lay so deep
Even her hand upon her lap
Seemed saturated with sleep;
And as Anne peeped, a child-like tread
Stole over her and then
On stealthy mouse-like feet she trod
And tip-toed out again.

Mary Gilmore who is Australia's most distinguished woman-poet has, among others, published "Married and other poems," "The passionate heart," etc. The one outstanding feature that makes her verse attractive is the essential womanliness of her themes, the bewitching feminineness of her expression and all the grace, the delicacy and ease that go with it:

I sit beside my sewing wheel
And croon my little song
Content to bide a wife at home
The whole day long.

So does she sing in exquisite strains with that throbbing heart of a woman–the symbol of sweet modesty and noble devotion. As she says, "The gilded queen upon her throne, compared with me is poor." Such quaint reproduction of realistic life, such reposeful ease of expression, such direct and simple outflow of the fullness of heart and the affluence of love are all visible in the verse of this present century. It has produced more women poets than before. This is not only true of this department of literature but as well of others, but this is remarkable especially in this sphere. Today, among others we have Lawrence Alma Tadema, Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott, author of "Idylls of Womanhood," Hellen Parry Eden, author of "A string of Sapphires".

Rose Flyman whose charm and humour and fantasy are arresting has an enticing quality in her verse that cannot be said to provoke thought while at the same time it makes the mind reflect:

Blind folk see the fairies
Oh, better far than we
Who miss the shining of their wings
Because our eyes are filled with things
We do not want to see.

Among others she has written "Fairies and Chimneys," "The Fairy Queen," "The Fairy flute." Sheila Kaye Smith, Rose Macaulay, Sylvia Lynd have each of them contributed to the poetic output of this century and made it with their delicate thought and graceful expression more resplendent, and enriched and beautified the treasury of English verse to an inestimable extent. Sylvia Lynd with her exquisite phrasing, her beautiful thought, her love of humanity and faith in the Divine, sings in soul-stirring verse:

God does not fail in any thing–
The sunny perfumes of the Spring
The blue dusks dropping fold on fold.

Other poets there are who need no introduction. They are famous if not by their poetry, by works transcendingly beautiful in other spheres. Hillaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, John Drinkwater, are luminous in the literary firmament. Kipling, the poet of Imperialism, than whom there is none so truly, typically representative of the age, has disturbed the placid waters of Victorianism and is responsible for the new orientation which the poetry of Keats and Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth has been given.

The poets whose names have been mentioned in this necessarily imperfect sketch may not have received the deserved meed of attention or admiration, essentially because of the nature of their themes and the peculiar limitations they set on themselves by choosing to be local, not universal. But they in their own way served to leave a fragrance behind, sweet and lovely. It may be that their permanence is problematical; but that they have been able to diffuse their 1ively imagination for their own soul's delight and in a manner appeased the hunger of kindred souls that thought but remained dumb in the ineffectual struggle for literary expression, is undeniable.