And bending down beside the glowing bars William Butler Yeats (1865-) Although hardly a typical conservative, Alfred Noyes in the main impresses one as a belated Victorian. He is much more interested in England's past than any of his fellow-poets. His versification, his diction, his subjects often recall Swinburne, Tennyson, or Keats. Too often also he seems to be trying to express something which has already been effectively said by some older poet. In his political and social as well as in his poetic ideals, he is with the majority of his generation. He has, like Tennyson and Longfellow, the faculty of saying in not too literary a manner what the average reader of poetry is thinking; hence he has been enormously popular. His popularity with the masses, as in the case of Longfellow, has caused some critics to deny him any poetic merit. This is manifestly unfair. A man may be a genuine poet in spite of the fact that he is not a startlingly original thinker. Noyes's poetry, however, does to a considerable degree reflect modern English life and thought. Perhaps the fact that his wife is an American accounts in part for his interest in this country and in what he would call the Anglo-American "mission." Noyes's technical skill, possibly his chief claim to fame, is little short of marvelous. He is equally at home in the ballad stanza, the sonnet, blank verse, and in the various lyric forms. His best poems are, by general consent, his ballads, among which "The Highwayman" and "Forty Singing Seamen" are probably the best. His collected poems contain many other excellent narratives, the best of which perhaps are the Tales of the Mermaid Tavern and Drake, a romance of Elizabethan England. John Masefield's early life taught him many things which poets who, like Noyes, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, go to Oxford or Cambridge, seldom have an opportunity to learn. At an early age he ran away and went to sea. As a result of his experience as a sailor, he is better able to picture the sea than any other writer except such novelists as Conrad, Melville, and Cooper, all of whom learned the sailor's life from actual experience. Masefield had many other unusual experiences before he began his career as poet. Once for a living he was forced to work as assistant in a New York barroom; his experience there has occasioned an interesting sonnet by William Rose Benét. Unlike most poets, Masefield has seen life from below as well as from above; and in his poems he has described the life of the lowly which until comparatively recent times got into literature none too often. Salt Water Poems and Ballads, somewhat in the vein of Kipling, was his first volume; but it was The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow in the Bye Street which brought him recognition. These two narratives are full of vivid pictures of the hard life of the poor; they fill the reader with a sense of the injustice of the social order which condemns certain individuals to a life of toil and suffering. Like most poets, Masefield owes his awakening to a poet whom he read at a critical time. Milton seems to have been first stimulated to write poetry by a reading of Spenser, "the poet's poet." It was Spenser also who awakened Keats; and it was Keats who seems to have been the inspiration of Amy Lowell. We quote Masefield's own account of his first reading of Chaucer, who gave him his first conception of what poetry might mean to him: "I did not begin to read poetry with passion and system until 1896. I was living then in Yonkers, N. Y. (at 8 Maple Street), Chaucer was the poet, and the Parliament of Fowls the poem, of my conversion. I read the Parliament all through one Sunday afternoon, with the feeling that I had been kept out of my inheritance and had then suddenly entered upon it, and had found it a new world of wonder and delight. I had never realized, until then, what poetry could be.” Although the influence of Shakespeare, Kipling, and other poets is to be seen in his work, the influence of Chaucer is the strongest to be found there. His later poems are less full of a rather lurid realism than The Everlasting Mercy. Masefield is perhaps no longer to be classed with the radical poets; certainly no tag describes his later verse, which is in harmony with the best traditions of English poetry. His subject matter and his diction are new, but the metrical forms which he employs are in the main the older forms used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Scott. Though he has written some excellent lyrics and many good Shakespearean sonnets, his best poems are probably his narrative poems, Dauber, The Widow in the Bye Street, Reynard the Fox, Enslaved, and Right Royal. The poem which we quote, although more characteristic of the earlier Masefield, furnishes an excellent illustration of the difference in spirit and subject between the new and the older poets. This This poem is pre fixed to Masefield's Collected Poems as indicating his poetic aims. A CONSECRATION Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known. Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road, The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad, The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load. The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout, The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired lookout. Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and mirth, The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth; Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth! THEIRS be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold; Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. AMEN. John Masefield (1878-) In the following poem Wilfrid Wilson Gibson suggests the change in his own poetic ideals which corresponds in general to that we note in passing from the Victorian poets to those of the present time. PRELUDE As one, at midnight, wakened by the call Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-) |