Volume 1 — ROBERT BRIDGES'S LYRICAL POEMS41

ROBERT BRIDGES'S LYRICAL POEMS41

By J. C. SQUIRE

I

MR. Bridges's new volume of poems (the first that he has published since he became Poet Laureate) must be read for what it is, the work of a man seventy-five years of age. This statement is not made as an excuse: there are weak—occasional and patriotic—poems in the book, but some also which are beautiful additions to his canon. But some of his critics, so inadequate is still the recognition of what he has done, have treated the book as though his claim to be a great poet rested partly upon it, failing to read it, as they should, in the light of all that has gone before it. Properly regarded, it awakes not disappointment, but wonder that a poet so old should still sometimes have the genuine impulse, should still keep his spirit fresh, and should still be capable of ingenious and fruitful experiments in technique—experiments moreover in which the content is never subordinated to the form, however exacting and interesting the form may be. October, Noel, Our Lady, Flycatchers, The West Front, Trafalgar Square, and Fortunatus Nimium are all poems that any man might be proud to write in his prime; and beyond these there is the delicious invention of The Flowering Tree:

The occasion may suitably be seized to make a few notes on Mr. Bridges's shorter—never mind the title and the word "lyrical"—poems as a whole.

II

Mr. Bridges is often written of as though he were primarily a technician. He has always taken a keen interest in prosody; he has written books, and formulated theories, about it; his experiments in classical metres and his notions about English spelling have, to those who have not troubled to discover the intellectual strength and the strong common sense which commonly marks his linguistic writings, given him something of the air of a pedant. But the theoriser and the innovator of the "shorter poems" has nothing to do with pedantry. There are poems in which the scrutinous eye may detect very elaborate pains. April 1885 is a fabric of internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration which it would be hard to parallel in English:

That may be called a tour-de-force; as a rule, though Mr. Bridges's variety of stanza and rhythm is immense, the craftsman never intrudes. His ingenuities merely serve their purpose; his music cannot be separated from his sense; his rhythms are sought, and found, as the only suitable rhythms for the words and the scenes that are being expressed and described. How otherwise than in the beautiful movement used can we imagine the picture of A Passer By?—the fresh blue day, the crowded sail, the vision of a queenly progress across the world to a far harbour in the south? It is one of fifty such feats, triumphs of fastidious art, never completely understood until the poems are read aloud. His power of music has developed steadily throughout his career, but scarcely a poem of any period can be quoted without illustrating his surpassing technical gifts. We shall come to many presently; here, when we are thinking primarily of the skill with which he weaves a close-fitting garment of sound for his thought, we may take as a single example, London Snow:

The accuracy of the description is extraordinary and continues as the town awakes, and boys go snowballing to school, a few carts creak along, and the pale sun rises to awake the noisier day. But the observation, the accuracy, the response of the heart to the beauty of the scene, might have been found elsewhere: the astonishing management of the rhythms, which, even when divorced from the meaning of the words, translate the steady falling, the wayward criss-crossing, the lightness and crispness, and soothing persistence of snow in an almost windless air, is peculiar to Mr. Bridges. Words and music are with him always inseparable: he is at the opposite pole from the man, often not unintelligent in other ways, who forces his material into a strait-jacket of jingle. In this respect his taste is as flawless, his subtlety as unfailing, as any in the records of literature.

III

It is possible, and it has often been stated, that Mr. Bridges will chiefly live as a poet of the English landscape. Certainly he would live if only his landscape poetry were preserved. It may seem a large assertion, but no Englishman has written so large a body of good landscape poetry. There are two obvious things to be said about it.

The first is that his landscape is the landscape of the South of England, more particularly of the Thames Valley and the downs by the sea—two regions which he significantly chooses as typical, when, in The Voice of Nature, he wishes to point an argument. He never describes foreign or remote scenes; and—it may be regarded as symbolic of his attitude to the more violent things of life—he never leaves the land for the sea. Even British territorial waters he never sails; there is much of the sea in his work, but it is the sea as seen from the shore, blue and smiling and dancing, or whipped by the wind, caught in a narrow peep between shoulders of the downs or watched from a hill through a telescope:

Mr. Bridges's landscape is bounded by the English Channel; his hills are the Downs; his rivers are clear and gentle streams; his trees oak and beech, elm and larch; he is as surely of the South of England as Wordsworth is of the North. And the second obvious thing is that, being a true landscape poet and not a romantic who exploits nature to find backgrounds for his passions, it is of ordinary landscapes that he writes. Tennyson, too, was an observer, but many of his best-known landscapes are of the selected kind. It is one thing to write of the sort of natural scene traditionally approved as remarkable: sunset on a marsh, sunrise on the Alps, stupendous cliffs, high cataracts, and breakers in the moon. It is another to describe, giving the breath of life to your description, what any man, going out on any day in any season, will see when he looks over a five-barred gate or takes a footpath through the woods. Mr. Bridges writes of nature like a countryman. His abnormal scenes are rare; he sees the beauty in the normal. He sings of nightingales when he hears them, but rooks are far more frequent in his verse; his suns seldom go down in flaming splendour, but drop red into the grey or die invisibly. One by one scenes from his familiar landscape have moved him to verse, until his books contain a complete catalogue of the English rural year, all its ordinary recurrent colours, and scents and sounds, trees, flowers, birds, skies and waters.

Spring. A village in the downs, and men winnowing in a barn. The palm-willows and hazels. The first flowers, primroses and green hyacinth spikes, shooting up amid moss and withered undergrowth. Brisk ploughmen. Birds happily courting in the jocund sun.

Summer. The garden, with bees on the flowers and in the overhanging limes, and rooks cawing in the elms. The hayfields in the sun; fields green with waves of rustling wheat; the hum of insects and the song of larks in a sky pure blue, or heaped with "slow pavilions of caverned snow," "sunshot palaces of cloud"; the downs, starred with small flowers, where rabbits nibble the grass; the noise of scythes. The river: still water, the dip of oars, a boat that glides with its reflection past flowering islets and dipping branches and meadows, where "the lazy cows wrench many a scented flower"; bathers; fish leaping in the pools; the peace of evening as it falls over water and trees; moonlight on the flashing weir. There are storms that blacken the sea and beat down the corn, but they pass and the sun comes out again, gathering strength.

Autumn. The garden in September, with late flowers. The ripe orchards and fields where "the sun spots the deserted gleanings with decay." The winds of October that come and fill ruts and pools with golden leaves. The later storms that mingle the leaves with snow.

Winter. The short days and the infrequent sun on lonely songless lands. Rooks after the plough, the team against the skyline. A rough sea and snow on the beach. Robin on the leafless bough. Dark afternoons and evenings by the fire, companioned or alone.

All those signs of the seasons and hundreds more could be illustrated from Mr. Bridges. One cannot do more here than huddle together a few characteristic fragments from which the whole may be deduced. If the first three are records of the shape, colour and movement of clouds, it is fitting: all Mr. Bridges's landscapes have skies, and most of his skies (being English) have clouds:

The best of all (such as The Downs and The Storm is Over) cannot be quoted except entirely; they are landscapes complete, earth and sky. But let it not be supposed that Mr. Bridges is ever a mere describer who sits down mechanically in front of any scene with his little box of water-colours. We have known such, and sometimes they have been learned in botany; their exactitude of detail is dull, their serried statements useless; only the man who is touched by the beauty in a scene, or aroused by a scene to an awareness of beauty behind it, will fuse the several things he sees into a whole. The writer who has felt no emotion communicates none, and the greatness of Mr. Bridges's poems of landscape is derived not solely from his knowledge of landscape, the wary eye, but from his feeling for it, the eye of love. His scenes are precise, but they are never photographs; there is no doubt about the sentiment that he felt when he saw them.

IV

And Mr. Bridges, even when at his best, is not only a landscape poet, but a poet cunning in the experiences of the heart. Very many of his poems are love poems and many of them are beautiful: if the fact has not been widely observed it must be because they are happy love poems, or at least because they are not excessive in expression. The proclivity that makes him, in another sphere, write not about storms but about calms after storms, is seen always: he has no violence, no vehement abandonment. But there is little of that in Wordsworth and other poets the depth of whose affections, the reality of whose suffering, cannot be doubted. Mr. Bridges's love-poetry makes no brutal assault on us. His constant reference to Virgil, Mozart and the old composers is significant. He never declaims, never raves, despairs, or burns in print: but he knows the ways of lovers' hearts, and his quiet stanzas, whether their subject be the pain of doubt, or separation, or the joy of union, or calm affection by the warm domestic hearth, have a truth and strength which outwear the ardours of many poets. In When My Love was Away, My Spirit sang all day, I will not let thee go, and twenty more he lover's calendar is written as that of the seasons elsewhere, and if his praise is soft and measured like the old music in which he so constantly delights, love's fine extravagance is, for all the tempered sound, nevertheless there:

He is self-controlled and never shouts; he does not hunt the universe for new and strange sorrows nor harrow himself overmuch with the problems of existence; but those griefs that fall to the common lot of mankind have come to him and drawn beautiful poetry from him. Many poets have written habitually of Death; few have said as little about Death as Mr. Bridges; but he has said all he has to say and need say about death, loss, and sorrow in two poems, the poem which begins:

and the other On a Dead Child: "Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee...."

In Winter Nightfall there is all the complaint of ailing old age, in Pater Filio the passionate anxiety of parent for child; the normal, inevitable griefs and dejections are all here, expressed with gravity, yet always with poignancy. But normal and inevitable they are. One gets the impression that, beyond the "common lot," the poet has had few distresses. Intense joy—nobody has given it better definition than he—is as rare as intense sadness, but ordinarily he is happy, or at worst not uncomfortably melancholy, and the happiness has become more pervasive as he has grown older. He is the poet of a leisured country life, led by a sensitive physically healthy man, with whom the major things of life have gone well and who, in those circumstances, is temperamentally inclined to a grateful contentment.

V

Mr. Bridges has not made the easy appeal by violence of expression; and he has not made the easy appeal by violence of doctrine. If he has been less discussed than many inferior writers, it is not so much that he is without doctrine as that he is without novel doctrine and has never been a doctrinaire. Any noisy demonstrator with a new lie may attract attention, if it is only the attention of those who wish to dispute with him; and it is easier to dispute (or agree) with the man whose "views" are explicit than with him who leaves them implicit. The mere fact that Mr. Bridges's practical philosophy has been held by hundreds of millions of ordinary people in many ages does not prove that he has no philosophy. He is a Christian, but he says little about that. He is politically sceptical of systems, but he says little about that. He accepts life, with its pains and pleasures, and he is happy that his life has been cast in an ordered traditional civilisation. He sees life in proportion, with the greater goods clear: childhood, the love of a woman and of children, the beauty of the earth, days of peace, joyful work, friendship. He does not proclaim a way of life, but it will be easy for his critics to deduce one from his poetry: if he does not tell people how to enjoy life it is because he is too busy enjoying it himself, and if he does not expound his religion, it is because he probably holds it to be "the religion of all sensible men." He never loses hold of his settled philosophy. In depression he does not imaginatively revel in the gloom of a Universe gone black, but consoles himself out of his knowledge:

In the peace of a churchyard he can write:

He lives through the moments of dejection and awaits, with sure hope, those moments when

There are times when he is at almost that pitch of bliss for days together, and he says with each evening:

And with any dawn may come the exhilaration and the resolve

Very rarely some slight dogmatic statement is actually present, the affirmation of something which is not necessarily false because it is as old as man, and modestly put. "For howso'er man hug his care, The best of his art is gay." He sees Spring in Winter more often than Winter in Spring:

It may by some be called an easy acceptance; by others the answer will be made that the refusal to accept does not get us much further. Mr. Bridges's own answer would perhaps be Lycomedes':

No attempt has been made in these brief notes to do more than indicate the artistic virtues and the outlook of Mr. Bridges: the elucidation is scant enough, and there was no space for reasoned criticism or for discussion of the qualities which he lacks and which other poets have possessed. But it may, in conclusion, be repeated that he is, as an artist, as careful and skilful as any poet who has ever written, and that as a man he has never lied, never posed, never assumed a factitious mood because it might impress or a factitious opinion because it might startle. He is sensible, and he is (in the best sense) commonplace in his outlook and in his affections and admirations; the changing conditions of our times have affected him little; he thinks more of the "man harrowing clods" than of the "breaking of nations"; the river, the cornfields, the village church, the domestic fireside, do obscure for him the mental and physical struggles of our world; he has his ideal of the sound mind in the sound body, and he cannot see why anything should modify it. But his philosophy will not stale when many of our controversialists have gone the way of Godwin and Malthus; and a reader who went to him for knowledge of how to live would certainly not be led on the rocks, little as Mr. Bridges may directly say on the subject. Nobody could be less like an apostle, but serenity, delight, cleanliness, and honesty are in him—and courage. The thought of death does not appal him, it braces him to work and joy. "Man hath his life," says Thetis in one of his dramas, "that it must end condemns it not for naught." The same certainty is in the lyrics:

The greatest of practical truths could not be put more stoutly, nor with a finer imaginative touch.