OF RUPERT BROOKE AND OTHER MATTERS

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

Since even to poets—and poets are erroneously supposed to sing their hearts out—there remains a certain right of privacy, I am not sure that we do well in writing so much of their personalities and their individual views of life. When we read a poem, we feel a temperament behind it; but the effort to catalogue and label that mind and its “message” is a little impertinent, and very futile. Mr. Rupert Brooke is an excellent illustration. His fondness for this or that—whether in landscape, food, ideas, or morals—is hardly our concern. He deserves to be treated not as a natural-history specimen,—a peculiar group of likes and dislikes and convictions,—but as an artist.

Mr. Brooke has the distinction, rare for a young poet, of not having written any bad verse, or of not having printed it. His sole volume, Poems (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1913), manifests in even its least notable pieces a creative spirit not allowed to run riot, but chastened and restrained by a keen sense of the obscure laws whose workings turn passion into a decorative pattern, and the emotions of the blood into intelligible designs.

Unless one is deeply concerned with such things, one is not likely to recognize the fundamental difference between those poets whose work is merely a more or less interesting emotional cry, and those nobler and more mature poets in whose work the crude elements of emotion are subordinated to the exigencies of an artistic conception. Only the latter have written fine poetry. The former may move us, as a crying child may move us; but they cannot exalt us to a peak that rises above the region of mere sympathetic response. They can never bring us a wind of revelation, or a flame from beyond the world. They are never the poets to whom other poets—and these are the only final judges—turn for inspiration or for fellowship.

For after all, there is no magic in any theme or in the emotion behind it; what is magical lies wholly in the design, the mould, in which the poet embodies a feeling that is probably common to all. No thought is so profound, no intimation so subtle, that it alone suffices as the stuff of poetry. But any thought, any intimation, if it be justly correlated and moulded into an organic and expressive shape, will serve to awaken echoes of a forgotten or unknown loveliness, and pierce its way into the very soul of the listener.

This sense of design of which I speak is not a hard, formal, conscious thing in the mind of the poet; but rather a carefully trained instinct, like the instinct that guides the hand of a fine draughtsman in the drawing of a curve of unexpected beauty. There is a right place to begin the curve, and a right place to end it; and at every instant of its length it is swayed and governed by a sense of relation to preceding and succeeding moments,—a sense subject to laws that defy mathematical formulation, but are perilously definite nevertheless. This sense of control is a rare thing to find in the work of so young a man as Mr. Brooke. Most young writers seem to approach their work as an unrestrained expression of themselves,—which it should be: but they forget that, for real self-expression, the most scrupulous mastery of the medium of expression is necessary. They regard the writing of verse as something in the nature of a joy-ride with an open throttle,—instead of seeing in it a piece of difficult driving, to be achieved only by the use of every subtlety of modulated speed and controlled steering that the mind is capable of employing.

That Mr. Brooke needs no such warning, let the following fine sonnet bear witness:

SUCCESS

It is significant that for his sonnets Mr. Brooke frequently chooses the Shakesperian form,—a form which, strangely, English poets have generally for at least a century discarded in favor of the Petrarchan model. The common feeling appears to be that the Petrarchan (a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e-c-d-e or some variation on that scheme) is musical and emotional; and that the Shakesperian (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g) is harsh, cold, mechanical, and incapable of subtle harmonies. The exact reverse of this is the case. It is perhaps too much to ask the reader to write a sequence of a hundred sonnets in each form, as a test; but I am confident that after such an experience, he would agree with me. The Petrarchan form is capable of only one successful effect; a rising on the crest of a wave, whose summit is the end of the eighth line; and a subsidence of the wave, in the course of the last six lines. The Shakesperian form, on the other hand, is capable of a literally infinite variety of effects: no pattern is set arbitrarily in advance, but, as in blank verse, any pattern may be created. The first twelve lines—which are nothing but three quatrains—can be moulded into a contour that fits any shape or size of thought whatsoever; and the couplet at the end—a device despised by the ignorant—may be used either to clinch the purport of the preceding twelve lines, or to blend with them, or startlingly to refute them, or to serve any other end that the genius of the writer is capable of imagining. The mere novice will like this form because of its simple rhyme-scheme and its superficial ease of working; the experienced amateur will prefer the Petrarchan form because, while the more complex rhyme-scheme presents for him no difficulties, the basic inadequacies of his thought-structure are fairly well concealed by the arbitrary sonnet-structure; but the master of imagination and expression is likely to follow Shakespeare and the novice in preferring the true English form, wherein he can with perfect freedom create a subtly modulated movement that will answer to every sway and leap of his thought. Mr. Brooke, whose sense of form is keen, is one of those who can safely and wisely try the more interesting and more dangerous medium.

I have thought it worth while to talk a good deal of the sonnet in connection with Mr. Brooke for the reason that several of his very finest pieces are in this form. The following is one that stands a good chance of being in the anthologies a hundred years from now:

THE HILL

Perhaps as magical as any of Mr. Brooke’s work is a longer poem called The Fish,—a remarkable and original piece of fantasy that makes the sub-aqueous universe vivid and real to the senses of the reader, and opens to him a new world of imaginative experience. Even the opening lines will serve to indicate something of the curious trance-quality:

In other of these poems, one is struck by Mr. Brooke’s passion for ugliness. He loves to take the most hideous and base facts of life and give them a place in his work alongside the things of beauty. It would be hard to find anything more humorous and at the same time more repulsive than this:

WAGNER

Now, a passion for ugliness like this is really a revolt against ugliness,—not the tender-skinned æsthete’s revolt, which consists in denying ugliness and escaping into a remote dream, but the strong man’s, the poet’s,—the revolt that is in effect a seizing of ugliness in all its repulsiveness and giving it a reason for existence by embodying it in a chosen pattern that is beautiful. By this method the poet masters emotion, even unpleasant emotion, making it subservient to a decorative design dictated by his own sense of proportion. It is thus that he is able to endure the world of actualities, and to find it comparable in interest with the world of his own thoughts. And by this process he saves himself from the sharpest bite of evil. For there is a curious consolation in transforming a spontaneous cry into a calculated work of art. By such a process one can give, to elements that before seemed only parts of a torturing chaos, their ordered places in a known scheme. One can impose propitious form upon one’s recollections, and create a little world of design-relations where the poignancy of experience is lost in the discipline of beauty. It is for this reason that the poet must be considered, in spite of everything, the happiest of men.