Puslapio vaizdai
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'I'd like to see a tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home,"-
And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.'

The reflective attitude of modern poetry to war can hardly go further. Sympathy has merged itself in a furious detestation of all those false pretences which in the past have presented the military spirit as a sort of enclosed garden of the poets' fantasy. The men who have seen the thing as it is have left the rest of us in no sort of doubt upon one indisputable fact. The poetry of the future will hardly venture to sentimentalise an experience which can prompt so sincere and so overwhelming an indignation. And indeed it is already to be noted that among those poets also who have not themselves made personal trial of war a new and restrained spirit may be recognised.

The truth has come home to the civilian no less than to the soldier. Mr Harold Monro's picture of the family gathering the night before the soldier returns to the front labours under no vain illusion with regard to the compensating glory of loss. Every moment, viewed from the stay-at-home's standpoint, is heavy with apprehension; every tick of the clock is like the warning of a death-watch. Suffering has become personal, intimate, homely, as all deep suffering always is. And when the news of loss comes home, as in Mr J. C. Squire's exquisitely poignant poem 'To a Bull-Dog,' it is no longer decorated with conventional comfort, but accepted, simply and honestly, for the devastating thing it is. The dog and one of his masters are left alone; the other master has fallen at the front. The poet addresses his dumb companion.

'When summer comes again,

And the long sunsets fade,

We shall have to go on playing the feeble game for two
That since the war we've played.

' And though you run expectant as you always do

To the uniforms we meet,

You'll never find Willy among all the soldiers
In even the longest street,

'Nor in any crowd; yet, strange and bitter thought, Even now were the old words said,

If I tried the old trick and said "Where's Willy?"

You would quiver and lift your head,

'And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious, And wait for the word to spring.

Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again,

You innocent old thing.'

Simple, direct pathos could scarcely be expressed in simpler, more direct phrase; and yet the metrical scheme of the poem is full of subtlety, rising on the wave of the long line just as the thought rises in intensity, and sinking back into repose in the short. Expression seems to be matched quite perfectly with thought; and the sentiment, purged of all self-pity and protestation, becomes almost intolerably sincere.

Sincerity, indeed, is the essence of the light with which the poetry of the last four years has slowly and increasingly flooded the crowded theatre of war. The quotations which we have given may surely speak for themselves. They must be acknowledged as presenting a broad panorama of the soldier's life from the day he leaves England until the hour of his death upon the field of honour; and their outstanding virtue is the penetration with which they probe to the essential spirit of warfare. Springing from various and diverse temperaments, they illustrate in turn the honest soldier's fear of fear, his pilgrimage from self-consciousness to altruism, his absorption into the machinery of war, and his gradual appreciation of that complex machine as a collection of human characters, each individual and all interacting, combining at last into a unity in which self is merged absolutely in a sense of common purpose and general obligation. The comparison of this poetry with the poetry of any other war in the history of the world can hardly fail to reassure the critic that, so far as the spiritual interpretation of war is concerned, the poets have risen manfully to their opportunity, and have abundantly justified the claim to sincerity and directness which appears to be the staple ambition of modern poetry, whatever its theme and occupation.

So far, it will be noted, we have been considering the

function of Poetry in offering a representation of War, psychologically and through its influence upon the soldier's mind; there remains to be considered the value of the material which War in its turn has offered to poetry, from the actual or realistic standpoint. And here, we believe, there has been a general tendency to overrate the value of the contribution. It has been claimed, for instance, that in the sister-art of painting the war has furnished artists with inspiration of the liveliest possibility. Can this be said with equal truth of Poetry? It seems very doubtful; and in any case the ground was ready-made for Poetry long before War had been dreamt of outside the impenetrable councils of Berlin. In the years immediately preceding the war there had been, as we have already noted, a growing fashion in English verse to seek crude and violent subjects for poetry; and this fashion was perilously fostered by the popular success of such realistic exercises as Mr John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy' and 'The Widow in the Bye-Street,' which may perhaps be said to display the method to its most effectual advantage.

The fashion was already exhausting itself before the autumn of 1914, but it has been adopted by a few experimentalists in an attempt to represent the outward aspects of War, condensed and vitalised to a single vivid and entirely external impression. It is noticeable, however, that the attempt has not been so much encouraged by those who had already affected this particular kind of realism, as accepted by others in a sort of faint discipleship. Such poems as Mr Masefield himself has devoted to the war have been almost entirely psychological and interpretative; and of the older of the Georgian poets it has been left to Mr Gibson to whittle poetry down to its barest core, in the effort to present a keen and undecorated outline of fact. It cannot be said that the experiment is altogether fortunate.

'This bloody steel

Has killed a man.
I heard him squeal
As on I ran.
'He watched me come
With wagging head.

I pressed it home,

And he was dead.

Or again:

'Though clean and clear

I've wiped the steel,

I still can hear

That dying squeal.'

'I watched it oozing quietly
Out of the gaping gash.
The lads thrust on to victory
With lunge and curse and crash.

The lads thrust on to victory,

With lunge and crash and shout.
I lay and watched, as quietly
His life was running out.'

The consensus of critical judgment would almost certainly decide that such experiments as these are failures. They fail, because they are concerned exclusively with external facts; imagination has not got to work upon them; the poet's art has not even made the effort of fusing the fact with the idea. And the same is true of Mr Robert Nichols's Assault,' an elaborate attempt to give instant and compelling expression to the sights and sounds of onslaught, which nevertheless falls completely short of the true, interpretative service of poetry to life.

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The true test of poetry must always be the test of reading aloud. Unless a poem can bear recitation, its workmanship is condemned. And to read Mr Nichols's

Assault' aloud is to be persuaded of a creaking chain of artistic improprieties, which strain vehemently towards effect, only to end in incoherence.

'Ha! Ha! Bunched figures waiting.
Revolver levelled: quick!

Flick! Flick!

Red as blood.

Germans. Germans.

Good! Oh, good!

Cool madness.'

This is neither metre nor vers libre.

It has no form or true proportion; the fever of war has infected it, and left it void.

The fact is, of course, that Poetry can only be produced when imagination has fused fact; and that this fusion is possible, even to emphatically realistic verse, is proved by the impressive success of Captain Robert Graves's 'It's a Queer Time,' where the poet reproduces, with provocative fidelity, that familiar state of mind under which a man is conscious of acting with his bodily functions in one world while he is living with his brain in another. Past and present are commingled in a riot of confusion.

•You're charging madly at them yelling "Fag!"

When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain
And find... you're digging tunnels through the hay
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day.

O springy hay, and lovely beams to climb!
You're back in the old sailor-suit again.
It's a queer time.

Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out

A great roar-the trench shakes and falls about

You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . . hullo!
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench,

Hanky to nose-that lyddite makes a stench

Getting her pinafore all over grime.

Funny! because she died ten years ago!

It's a queer time.'

This realism of the intellectual aspect of War, as

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