If this doesn"t make you rush out and buy her poems, nothing will. It is the topmost level of her achievement, and it is an achievement that even so musical a poet as Walter de la Mare would not be ashamed of having written. Where, I would know, has the love of little material things been so deliciously, so navely confessed by any other poet? Listen to her in rebellious mood:
"You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs With rights and wrongs and arguments of good, You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns, You stop my heart and turn it into wood.
I serve not G.o.d, but make my idol fair From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood, Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair By Beauty"s fingers to her changing mood.
The long line of the sea, the straight horizon, The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet, And moonlight clear as gra.s.s my great religion, And sunrise falling on the quiet street.
The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay, And lovers in the secret sheets of night Trembling like instruments of music, till the day Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white."
Here, surely, is that love of beauty, finely expressed, which is the first thing we look for in any true poet. She invokes the aid of her "three musketeers of faithful following," Love, Humour and Rebellion, and these three stalwarts never desert her, and one finds oneself wishing that some other poets had had the good sense to recruit the services of such helpful henchmen.
Especially pleasant is it to find that she has not yet outgrown her youthful pessimism: once youth has pa.s.sed, time cries for self-expression in other ways than these:
"There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief: Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon: Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf, Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.
The long road unto nothing I will sing, Sing on one note, monotonous and dry, Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring No more emotion than the fear to die.
Grey house, grey house and after that grey house, Another house as grey and steep and still: An old cat tired of playing with a mouse, A sick child tired of chasing down the hill."
There are nothing like enough songs of love or of joy, and no one knows that better than Iris Tree, but Youth loves to drench itself in hopeless greyness, if only to run through the whole gamut of human emotions, "just for fun." It is like a child"s dressing up in a myriad different costumes:
"I see myself in many different dresses ...
I see myself the child of many races, Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses; Within my soul a thousand weary traces Of pain and joy and pa.s.sionate excesses...."
Much more significant of maturity is her bizarre _Sonnet for Would-be Suicides_ (that is my t.i.tle for it, not hers):
"How often, when the thought of suicide With ghostly weapon beckons us to die, The ghosts of many foods alluring glide On golden dishes, wine in purple tide To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye Like ta.s.selled grapes to Tantalus: the sly Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie Resigned to death like heroes--July peas, Expectant bottles foaming at the brink-- White bread, and honey of the golden bees-- A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink, A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese, And cups where berries float and bubbles wink."
One at least of her faithful musketeers has served her to excellent purpose in this eminently philosophical poem. Uncle Max"s eyes must twinkle with sheer merriment every time he reads this: it must be pleasant to have a niece so capable of profiting by his genius. Another friend of the family, Rupert Brooke, must have appreciated the panegyric on Worms. He may have directly inspired it:
"Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute, Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour, Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute, Yet greater than G.o.ds or heroes that have gone before.
For you I sheave the harvest of my hair, For you the whiteness of my flesh, my pa.s.sion"s valour, For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.
For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence, For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate, Science for giving wounds, and healing science.
For you the heart"s wild love, beauty, long care, Virginity, pa.s.sionate womanhood, perfected wholeness, For you the unborn child that I prepare, You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!"
More childishness, but how delightful, how exactly in the spirit of Donne.
One string on which she continually harps is found most lucidly expressed in this stanza:
"Loneliness I love, And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.
Loneliness I love, But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands ...
My spirit speaks In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy Murmuring the tunes For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.
The shadowy silences Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities, And that is why The noise of the tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing, And I am clad In the l.u.s.t-lipped whispering of future caresses, Holiness I love, And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs, The crucified feet Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.
Holiness I love And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.
But that is why Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear The vesture of secrecy Which hides the human nakedness of G.o.d."
That is a very definitely true cry from the depths and it is oft-repeated.
"To fashion for my love one perfect song" has been ever her aim, but her generation has been too much for her.
"Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion Delirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint, Make cryptic perorations of complaint, Inverted religion, and perverted pa.s.sion."
This may not be good poetry, but it is an admirably concise epitaph of the age.
Sometimes she escapes into riotous, wanton imagery as a refuge:
"Moonlight flows over me, Spreads her bright, watery hair over my face, Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes Wreathed with syringa, and plaited with hyacinths; Hair of the moonlight falling about me, Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain."
But in the end she comes back, gloriously sure of herself, in a poem which is worthy to stand by the one I first quoted:
"I know what happiness is-- It is the negation of thought, The shutting off Of all those brooding phantoms that surround As dank trees in a forest Cutting the daylight into rags, Caging the sun In rusted prison bars.
Happiness loves to lie at a river"s edge And make no song, But listen to the water"s murmuring wisdom, The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together, The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill: Opening wide the violet-petalled doors Of every shy and cloistered sense, That all the scent and music of the world May rush into the soul.
And happiness expands The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams, For moth-like fancies winged with evening, For dove-breasted silences, For shadowy reveries And starry pilgrims ...
I know what happiness is-- It is the giving back to Earth Of all our furtive thefts, The lurid jewels that we stole away From pa.s.sion, sin and pain, Because they glittered strangely, luring us With their forbidden beauty.
Because our childish fingers curiously Crave the pale secrets of the moon And grope for dangerous toys.
Happiness comes in giving back to Earth The things we took from her with violent hands, Remembering only That her dust is our garment, Her fruits our endeavour, Her waters our priestess, Her leaves our interpreters to G.o.d, Her hills our infinite patience."
That is a brave cry: "I know what happiness is." Happy indeed is the man or woman who has found this elixir of life--thrice happy is the poet who not only has found it, but is able to give exact and musical expression to the discovery. Iris Tree has matured: we watch her in the process of discarding her childish things.... When next we read her we shall find a full-fledged poet. There is earnest already of great things to come.
That is why we should read her now. To watch a poet try her wings, soar and fall, only to soar again, is to be counted one of life"s finer joys.
IV
THE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the "neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual.
His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an obstruction in his pursuit of beauty.
"The problem which the most authentic modern poetry is endeavouring to solve is to give beauty a fuller content by exploring unfamiliar paths of sensation and perception," but Mr Huxley most nearly approximates to beauty when he is most familiar. It is perhaps permissible to doubt whether these new, unfamiliar paths can lead anywhere but to cul-de-sac or cesspool.
At any rate, in Mr Huxley"s opinion, "Your centaurs are your only poets." He finds beauty "no far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to be smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent: it is not a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medieval in its implication with the very threads of life." He desires "no Paphian cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating, drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in adultery; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating."
So much for his theory: in practice he has given us many tentative exercises which reek of the intellectual, are rich in humour, deadly in their irony, and one long poem, _Leda_, which has much beauty (though it has been called the beauty of self-indulgence rather than that pure beauty of self-discipline), and pa.s.sages of surprising ugliness.
Whenever a poet seeks to retell a well-known story, like Keats in _Endymion_ and _Hyperion_, we invariably find ourselves comparing the effect with that which a parson gives when he translates a Biblical fable into the modern jargon which pa.s.ses for English prose in the pulpit.
In the latter case we shiver with disgust; in the former it is the test of the poet"s genius that we are uplifted and find the original vastly improved by the fresh treatment.
Mr Brett-Young does nothing to improve our impression of Thamar, Mr Huxley infuses into the old story of _Leda_ a thousand new concepts. Let your mind dwell on this picture:
"The tunic falls about her feet, and she Steps from the crocus folds of drapery, Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.
G.o.d-like she stood; then broke into a run, Leaping and laughing in the light, as though Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow Of generous blood and fire that to remain Too long in statued queenliness were pain To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.
She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, ...
Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.