COMPARISONS
PRESS NOTICES “ Poems of the Past and Present. ”
INTRODUCTION
WITH as much grace as if a monoplanist should attempt to write a preface to a book on flying for an albatross, so may a writer of mere prose attempt to pen an introduction to a book of poetry.
The bird and man both use the air, but with a difference. So do the poet and the man of prose use pen and ink.
Familiarity with tools, used in two branches of one art (or trade), is apt to prove a snare.
Music and poetry, the most ethereal of the arts upon the face of them, are in a way more mathematical than prose, for both have formulæ. Hence, their appeal goes quicker to men’s minds, and oversteps countries and languages to some degree, and makes it difficult to write about them. Of late, young poets, those who have bulked the largest in the public eye, those that the world has hailed as modern, have often been obscure. What is modernity? To be modern is to touch the senses of the age you write for. To me, a fool who owns a motor-car is just as great a fool as was a fool of the stone age.
The only true modernity is talent, and Lucian of Samosata was as modern to the full as Guy de Maupassant. The poet for whose verses I am writing this my introduction, preface, foreword, call it what you will, is one of those whose meaning he who runs may read.
Does she do well in making herself clear? I think so, for though there are those who prefer a mist of words, holding apparently that poetry should be written in Chinook, or Malagasy, this opinion must of necessity be of the nature of what Ben Jonson called a “humour.”
Few men to-day read Eupheus and fewer Gongora. Yet in their time their concepts were considered to be fine flowers of poetry. Those who wrote so that all men could understand, as Sapho, Campion, Jorge Maurique, Petrarca, Villon, and their fellow-singers in the celestial spheres where poets sing, crowned with the bays of the approval of countless generations, all wrote clearly. Their verses all were clear as is the water running over chalk in a south country trout-stream, such as the Itchin or the Test.
I take two specimens of Miss Radclyffe-Hall’s poetry to illustrate what I have said. She writes of a blind ploughman, whose prayer is to his friend to set him in the sun.
“Turn my face towards the East
And praise be to God.”
One sees him sitting, wrinkled and bent, and ploughworn in the sun, and thanking God according to his faith, for light interior, for that interior vision which all the mystics claim.
“God who made His sun to shine
On both you and me,
God who took away my eyes,
That my soul might see.”
This shows the poet in an unusual light, for most poets write on far different subjects; but here is one which is eternal, and has been eternal since the time of Œdipus.
Again in the verses, “Thoughts at Ajaccio,” she shows a love of the earth and of its fulness, a feeling which has been the birthright of all English writers of good verse from the remotest times.
“Fill me with scent of upturned ground,
Soft perfume from thy bosom drawn.”
This is the feeling that has inspired so many poets, and shows the writer not striving to be modern or filled with strange conceits; but with a love and trust of the brown earth, from which all poets take their birth, and into which they all return.
R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
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