Mr. Ralph Hodgson
Reading edition
Mr. Ralph Hodgson is a poet who has still not quite got his due. He has just collected into one volume (Poems), with a few others, the verses published in a series of “Flying Fame Booklets” with Mr. Lovat Fraser’s charming and ingenious cuts. Ten years’ work goes into seventy pages, so that a charge of over-production is scarcely possible. In the circumstances Mr. Hodgson might have included one or two poems, The Last Blackbird, for example, from his earlier book. That book as a whole, however, was not comparable with this, which contains The Bull, indubitably one of the finest poems of our generation, The Song of Honour, which is almost as good, and many charming lighter lyrics. Eve, particularly, is a feat. Mr. Hodgson makes a delicate tripping song out of the Fall of Man; he pictures Eve, “that orchard sprite,”
Wondering, listening, Listening, wondering, Eve with a berry Half-way to her lips,
and the serpent, a graceful beast,
Tumbling in twenty rings Into the grass.
The whole story trips like that.
“Eva!” Each syllable Light as a flower fell, “Eva!” he whispered the Wondering maid, Soft as a bubble sung Out of a linnet’s lung, Soft and most silverly “Eva!” he said.
But—and this is the achievement—one is not left with a sense of inadequacy and triviality. For the feeling throughout is sincere, and the nature of the calamity is conveyed as clearly by Mr. Hodgson, who makes the small birds chatter with sorrow and indignation when Eve falls, as it would have been by another man with all the paraphernalia of darkening heavens, thunderous voices, and long Latin words.
But this poem is not on the same plane as The Bull and The Song of Honour. No writer has ever entered more completely into the feelings of an animal than does Mr. Hodgson as, in a setting of tropical forest and swamp, he shows the defeated, expelled, and dying leader of the herd remembering his calfhood, and his early fights, and his prowess and his final fall, whilst the obscene birds circle round overhead waiting for his death. The Song of Honour, an attempt to echo the Hymn of Praise sung by all things to their Maker, is, in the nature of things, more disjointed and impressionistic, less exact and well-shaped. It owes as much as any poem can decently owe to another to Christopher Smart’s Song to David. But the strength of feeling never fails, and parts of the breathless pæan are very beautiful.
The music of a lion strong That shakes a hill a whole night long, A hill as loud as he, The twitter of a mouse among Melodious greenery, The ruby’s and the rainbow’s song, The nightingale’s—all three, The song of life that wells and flows From every leopard, lark and rose And everything that gleams or goes Lack-lustre in the sea. I heard it all, I heard the whole Harmonious hymn of being roll Up through the chapel of my soul And at the altar die, And in the awful quiet then Myself I heard, Amen, Amen, Amen I heard me cry! I heard it all and then although I caught my flying senses, Oh, A dizzy man was I! I stood and stared; the sky was lit, The sky was stars all over it, I stood, I knew not why, Without a wish, without a will, I stood upon that silent hill And stared into the sky until My eyes were blind with stars and still I stared into the sky.
Those are two of the last stanzas, and even standing alone, I think, give something of the quality of the poem. They certainly are characteristic in the simplicity of their language.