Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (621 page)

That then is the history of twenty years of reading verse, and I think I may say that, for men whose life-business is reading, we have read practically no poetry at all. And, during those twenty years we should have said with assurance that poetry was an artificial, a boring, an unnecessary thing.

IV

But, about five years ago, we — I and that group of friends — began to think of founding a periodical — one is always thinking of founding periodicals! We had then to think of what place verse must take in the scheme of things. With our foreign ideas in which academic palms and precedence figure more strongly than they do in the minds of most freeborn islanders, it did not take us long to arrive at the conclusion that poetry must have the very first place in that journal — not because it was a living force, but just because it was dead and must be treated with deference. Moreover, if I may make a further confession, our express aim in founding the periodical in question, was to print a poem by Mr Hardy, a poem that other periodicals had found too — let us say — outspoken for them to print. Now it would have been ridiculous to found an immense paper for the express purpose of printing one particular poem and not to give that poem the utmost pride of place.

So we printed
A Sunday Morning Tragedy
first and the rest in a string after it. It seemed proper, French and traditional to do so.

And then we began to worry our poor heads about poetry. We had, perforce, to read a great deal of it, and much of what we read seemed to be better stuff than we had expected. We came, for instance, upon the poems of Mr Yeats. Now for ten or twenty years we had been making light of Mr Yeats; we used to sniff irritably at
I will arise and go now,
and to be worried by
The Countess Kathleen.
Mr Yeats appeared to be a merely “literary” poet; an annoying dilettante. I do not now know whether Mr Yeats has changed or whether we have, but I am about in a moment to try to make an
amende honourable.

At any rate we came upon the work of Mr Yeats, of Mr De la Mare, of Mr Flint, of Mr D. H. Lawrence, and upon suggestions of power in Mr Pound’s derivations from the Romance writers. And gradually it has forced itself upon us that there is a new quality, a new power of impressionism that is open to poetry, and that is not so much open to prose. It is a quality that attracted us years ago to the poems of Mr Hardy and of Mr George Meredith. (I know that my younger friends will start ominously at this announcement, that they will come round to my house and remonstrate seriously for many weary hours. But I must make the best of that.)

For the fact is that, in Mr Yeats as in Mr Hardy, there are certain qualities that very singularly unite them — qualities not so much of diction or of mind but qualities that can only be expressed in pictorial terms. For when I think of Mr Hardy’s work I seem to see a cavernous darkness, a darkness filled with wood-smoke, touched here and there with the distant and brooding glow of smothered flame. When I think of Mr Yeats’ work I seem to see a grey, thin mist over a green landscape, the mist here and there being pierced by a sparkle of dew, by the light shot from a gem in a green cap. (I have tried to write this as carefully as I can, so as to express very precisely what is in the end a debt of sheer gratitude. I mean that really and truly that is the sort of feeling that I have — as if I had discovered two new countries — the country of the hardly illumined and cavernous darkness, the country of the thin grey mist over the green fields, and as if those countries still remained for me to travel in.)

It will at first sight appear that here is a contradicting of the words with which we set out — the statement that it is the duty of the poet to reflect his own day. But there is no contradiction. It is the duty of the poet to reflect his own day as it appears to him; as it has impressed itself upon him.
 
Because I and my friends have, as the saying is, rolled our humps mostly in a landscape that is picked out with the red patches of motor-bus sides, it would be the merest provincialism to say that the author of
Innisfree
should not have sat in the cabins of county Galway or of Connemara, or wherever it is, or that the author of the
Dynasts
should not have wandered about a country called Wessex reading works connected with Napoleon. We should not wish to limit Mr Yeats’ reading to the daily papers, nor indeed do we so limit our own, any more than we should wish to limit the author of that most beautiful impression, the
Listeners,
to the purlieus of Bedford Street where the publishers’ offices are.

What worried and exasperated us in the poems of the late Lord Tennyson, the late Lewis Morris, the late William Morris, the late — well, whom you like — is not their choice of subject, it is their imitative handling of matter, of words, it is their derivative attitude...

Reading is an excellent thing; it is also experience, and both Mr Yeats and Mr De la Mare have read a great deal. But it is an experience that one should go through not in order to acquire imitative faculties, but in order to find — oneself. Roughly speaking, the late Victorian writers imitated Malory or the Laxdaela Saga and commented upon them; roughly speaking, again, the poets of to-day record their emotions at receiving the experience of the emotions of former writers. It is an attitude critical | rather than imitative, and to the measure of its truth it is the truer poetical attitude.

The measure of the truth has to be found. It would be an obvious hypocrisy in men whose first unashamed action of the day is to open the daily paper for the cricket scores and whose poetic bag and baggage is as small as I have related — it would be an obvious hypocrisy in us to pretend to have passed the greater part of our existences in romantic woods. But it would be a similar hypocrisy in Mr De la Mare, Mr Yeats, or Mr Hardy to attempt to render Life in the terms of the sort of Futurist picture that life is to me and my likes.

To get a sort of truth, a sort of genuineness into your attitude towards the life that God makes you lead, to follow up your real preferences, to like as some of us like the hard, bitter, ironical German poets, the life of restaurants, of Crowds, of flashed impressions, to love, as we may love, in our own way, the Blessed Virgin, Saint Katharine or the sardonic figure of Christina of Milan — and to render it — that is one good thing. Or again, to be genuinely Irish, with all the historic background of death, swords, flames, mists, sorrows, wakes, and again mists — to love those things and the Irish sanctities and Paganisms — that is another good thing if it is truly rendered; the main thing is the genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression.

The actual language — the vernacular employed — is a secondary matter. I prefer personally the language of my own day, a language clear enough for certain matters, employing slang where slang is felicitous and vulgarity where it seems to me that vulgarity is the only weapon against dullness. Mr Doughty, on the other hand — and Mr Doughty is a great poet — uses a barbarous idiom as if he were chucking pieces of shale at you from the top of a rock. Mr Yeats makes literal translations from the Irish; Mr Hardy does not appear to bother his head much about words, he drags them in as he likes. Mr De la Mare and Mr Flint are rather literary; Mr Pound as often as not is so unacquainted with English idioms as to be nearly unintelligible.

(God forbid, by the by, that I should seem to arrogate to myself a position as a poet side by side with Mr De la Mare, or, for the matter of that, with Mr Pound. But in stating my preferences I am merely, quite humbly, trying to voice what I imagine will be the views or the aspirations, the preferences or the prejudices, of the poet of my day and circumstances when he shall at last appear and voice the life of dust, toil, discouragement, excitement, and enervation that I and many millions lead to-day.)

When that poet does come it seems to me that his species will be much that of the gentlemen I have several times mentioned. His attitude towards life will be theirs; his circumstances only will be different. An elephant is an elephant whether he pours, at an African water-hole, mud and water over his free and scorched flanks, or whether, in the Zoological Gardens, he carries children about upon his back.

HIGH GERMAN
Y

The following poems were printed in the volume called “High Germany,” published by Messrs Duckworth in 1911. “The Starling” also appeared in the
Fortnightly Review.

THE STARLIN
G

IT’S an odd thing how one changes...
Walking along the upper ranges
Of this land of plains,
In this month of rains,
On a drying road where the poplars march along,
Suddenly,
With a rush of wings flew down a company,
A multitude, throng upon throng,
Of starlings,
Successive orchestras of song,
Flung, like the babble of surf,
On to the roadside turf —

And so, for a mile, for a mile and a half — a long way,
Flight follows flight
Thro’ the still grey light
Of the steel-grey day,
Whirling beside the road in clamorous crowds,
Never near, never far, in the shade of the poplars and clouds.

It’s an odd thing how one changes...
And what strikes me now as most strange is:
After the starlings had flown
Over the plain and were gone,
There was one of them stayed on alone
In the trees; it chattered on high,
Lifting its bill to the sky,
Distending its throat,
Crooning harsh note after note,
In soliloquy,
Sitting alone.

And after a hush
It gurgled as gurgled a well,
Warbled as warbles a thrush,
Had a try at the sound of a bell
And mimicked a jay —
But I,
Whilst the starling mimicked on high
Pulsing its throat and its wings,
I went on my way
Thinking of things,
Onwards and over the range
And that’s what is strange.

I went down ‘twixt tobacco and grain,
Descending the chequer board plain
Where the apples and maize are;
Under the loopholed gate
In the village wall
Where the goats clatter over the cobbles
And the intricate, straw-littered ways are...
The ancient watchman hobbles
Cloaked, with his glasses of horn at the end of his nose,
Wearing velvet short hose
And a three-cornered hat on his pate,
And his pike-staff and all.
And he carries a proclamation,
An invitation,
To great and small,
Man and beast
To a wedding feast,
And he carries a bell and rings...
From the steeple looks down a saint,
From a doorway a queenly peasant
Looks out, in her bride-gown of lace
And her sister, a quaint little darling
Who twitters and chirps like a starling.
And this little old place,
It’s so quaint,
It’s so pleasant;
And the watch bell rings, and the church bell rings
And the wedding procession draws nigh,
Bullock carts, fiddlers and goods.
But I
Pass on my way to the woods
Thinking of things.

Years ago I’d have stayed by the starling,
Marking the iridescence of his throat,
Marvelling at the change of his note;
I’d have said to the peasant child: “Darling
Here’s a groschen and give me a kiss”... I’d have stayed
To sit with the bridesmaids at table,
And have taken my chance
Of a dance
With the bride in her laces
Or the maids with the blonde, placid faces
And ribbons and crants in the stable...

But the church bell still rings
And I’m far away out on the plain,
In the grey weather amongst the tobacco and grain,
And village and gate and wall
Are a long grey line with the church over all
And miles and miles away in the sky
The starlings go wheeling round on high
Over the distant ranges.
The violin strings
Thrill away and the day grows more grey.
And I... I stand thinking of things.
Yes, it’s strange how one changes.

IN THE LITTLE OLD MARKET-PLAC
E

(TO THE MEMORY OF A.V.)

IT rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables:
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains,
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of the old Town Hall.

The mountains being so tall
And forcing the town on the river,
The market’s so small
That, with the wet cobbles, dark arches and all,
The owls
(For in dark rainy weather the owls fly out
Well before four), so the owls
In the gloom
Have too little room
And brush by the saint on the fountain
In veering about.

The poor saint on the fountain!
Supported by plaques of the giver
To whom we’re beholden;
His name was de Sales
And his wife’s name von Mangel.
(Now is he a saint or archangel?)
He stands on a dragon
On a ball, on a column
Gazing up at the vines on the mountain:
And his falchion is golden,

And his wings are all golden.
He bears golden scales
And in spite of the coils of his dragon, without hint
of alarm or invective
Looks up at the mists on the mountain.

(Now what saint or archangel
Stands winged on a dragon,
Bearing golden scales and a broad bladed sword all golden?
Alas, my knowledge
Of all the saints of the college,
Of all these glimmering, olden
Sacred and misty stories
Of angels and saints and old glories...
Is sadly defective.)
The poor saint on the fountain...

On top of his column
Gazes up sad and solemn.
But is it towards the top of the mountain
Where the spindrifty haze is
That he gazes?
Or is it into the casement
Where the girl sits sewing?
There’s no knowing.

Hear it rain!
And from eight leaden pipes in the ball he stands on,
That has eight leaden and copper bands on,
There gurgle and drain
Eight driblets of water down into the basin.
And he stands on his dragon
And the girl sits sewing
High, very high in her casement
And before her are many geraniums in a parket
All growing and blowing

In box upon box
From the gables right down to the basement
With the frescoes and carvings and paint...

The poor saint!
It rains and it rains,
In the market there isn’t an ox,
And in all the emplacement
For wagons there isn’t a wagon,
Not a stall for a grape or a raisin,
Not a soul in the market
Save the saint on his dragon
With the rain dribbling down in the basin,
And the maiden that sews in the casement.

They are still and alone,
Mutterseelens
alone,
And the rain dribbles down from his heels and his crown,
From wet stone to wet stone.
It’s as grey as at dawn,
And the owls, grey and fawn,
Call from the little town hall
With its arch in the wall,
Where the fire-hooks are stored.

From behind the flowers of her casement
That’s all gay with the carvings and paint,
The maiden gives a great yawn,
But the poor saint —
No doubt he’s as bored!
Stands still on his column
Uplifting his sword
With never the ease of a yawn
From wet dawn to wet dawn...