Georgian Poetry is an anthology of verse which has been published during the reign of our present king, George V. It contains one poem of my own, but this fact will not, I hope, preclude my reviewing the book.
This collection is like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams. The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people — Ibsen, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy — represent the dream we are waking from, ft was a dream of demolition. Nothing was, but was nothing. Everything was taken from us. And now our lungs are full of new air, and our eyes see it is morning, but we have not forgotten the terror of the night. We dreamed we were falling through space into nothingness, and the anguish of it leaves us rather eager.
But we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning. The first song is nearly a cry, fear and the pain of remembrance sharpening away the pure music. And that is this book.
The last years have been years of demolition. Because faith and belief were getting pot-bound, and the Temple was made a place to barter sacrifices, therefore faith and belief and the Temple must be broken. This time art fought the battle, rather than science or any new religious faction. And art has been demolishing for us: Nietzsche, the Christian religion as it stood; Hardy, our faith in our own endeavour; Flaubert, our belief in love. Now, for us, it is all smashed, we can see the whole again. We were in prison, peeping at the sky through loop-holes. The great prisoners smashed at the loop-holes, for lying to us. And behold, out of the ruins leaps the whole sky.
It is we who see it and breathe in it for joy. God is there, faith, belief, love, everything. We are drunk with the joy of it, having got away from the fear. In almost every poem in the book comes this note of exultation after fear, the exultation in the vast freedom, the illimitable wealth that we have suddenly got.
But send desire often forth to scan
The immense night that is thy greater soul,
says Mr. Abercrombie. His deadly sin is Prudence, that will not risk to avail itself of the new freedom. Mr. Bottomley exults to find men for ever building religions which yet can never compass all.
Yet the yielding sky
Invincible vacancy was there discovered.
Mr. Rupert Brooke sees
every glint
Posture and jest and thought and tint
Freed from the mask of transiency
Triumphant in eternity,
Immote, immortal
and this at Afternoon Tea. Mr. John Drinkwater sings:
We cherish every hour that strays
Adown the cataract of days:
We see the clear, untroubled skies,
We see the glory of the rose —
Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson hears the “terror turned to tenderness,” then
I watched the mother sing to rest
The baby snuggling on her breast.
And to Mr. Masefield:
When men count
Those hours of life that were a bursting fount
Sparkling the dusty heart with living springs.
There seems a world, beyond our earthly things,
Gated by golden moments.
It is all the same — hope, and religious joy. Nothing is really wrong. Every new religion is a waste-product from the last, and every religion stands for us for ever. We love Christianity for what it has brought us, now that we are no longer upon the cross.
The great liberation gives us an overwhelming sense of joy, joie d’etre, joie de vivre. This sense of exceeding keen relish and appreciation of life makes romance. I think I could say every poem in the book is romantic, tinged with a love of the marvellous, a joy of natural things, as if the poet were a child for the first time on the seashore, finding treasures. “Best trust the happy moments,” says Mr. Masefield, who seems nearest to the black dream behind us. There is Mr. W. H. Davies’s lovely joy, Mr. De La Mare’s perfect appreciation of life at still moments, Mr. Rupert Brooke’s brightness, when he “lived from laugh to laugh,” Mr. Edmund Beale Sargant’s pure, excited happiness in the woodland — it is all the same, keen zest in life found wonderful. In Mr. Gordon Bottomley it is the zest of activity, of hurrying, labouring men, or the zest of the utter stillness of long snows. It is a bookful of Romance that has not quite got clear of the terror of realism.
There is no carpe diem touch. The joy is sure and fast. It is not the falling rose, but the rose for ever rising to bud and falling to fruit that gives us joy. We have faith in the vastness of life’s wealth. We are always rich: rich in buds and in shed blossoms. There is no winter that we fear. Life is like an orange tree, always in leaf and bud, in blossom and fruit.
And we ourselves, in each of us, have everything. Somebody said: “The Georgian poets are not love poets. The influence of Swinburne has gone.” But I should say the Georgian poets are just ripening to be love poets. Swinburne was no love poet. What are the Georgian poets, nearly all, but just bursting into a thick blaze of being? They are not poets of passion, perhaps, but they are essentially passionate poets. The time to be impersonal has gone. We start from the joy we have in being ourselves, and everything must take colour from that joy. It is the return of the blood, that has been held back, as when the heart’s action is arrested by fear. Now the warmth of blood is in everything, quick, healthy, passionate blood. I look at my hands as I write and know they are mine, with red blood running its way, sleuthing out Truth and pursuing it to eternity, and I am full of awe for this flesh and blood that holds this pen. Everything that ever was thought and ever will be thought, lies in this body of mine. This flesh and blood sitting here writing, the great impersonal flesh and blood, greater than me, which I am proud to belong to, contains all the future. What is it but the quick of all growth, the seed of all harvest, this body of mine? And grapes and corn and birds and rocks and visions, all are in my fingers. I am so full of wonder at my own miracle of flesh and blood that I could not contain myself, if I did not remember we are all alive, have all of us living bodies. And that is a joy greater than any dream of immortality in the spirit, to me. It reminds me of Rupert Brooke’s moment triumphant in its eternality; and of Michelangelo, who is also the moment triumphant in its eternality; just the opposite from Corot, who is the eternal triumphing over the moment, at the moment, at the very point of sweeping it into the flow.
Of all love poets, we are the love poets. For our religion is loving. To love passionately, but completely, is our one desire.
What is “The Hare” but a complete love poem, with none of the hackneyed “But a bitter blossom was born” about it, nor yet the Yeats, “Never give all the heart.” Love is the greatest of all things, no “bitter blossom” nor such-like. It is sex-passion, so separated, in which we do not believe. The Carmen and Tosca sort of passion is not interesting any longer, because it can’t progress. Its goal and aim is possession, whereas possession in love is only a means to love. And because passion cannot go beyond possession, the passionate heroes and heroines — Tristans and what-not — must die. We believe in the love that is happy ever after, progressive as life itself.
I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in the anthology of Georgian Poetry.