Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

NOVELISTS point to a third Renaissance in this age; art critics declare an unexampled and mighty activity among painters; music seems likely to become the expressive art of democracy. London is in the rebuilding, but the singers are few; nowhere is there raised a voice to chant the aspiration that everywhere is fumbling for expression. Here and there an isolated poet cuts him a reed and pipes, but the song he pipes is most often the song of his isolation, and his thought is cold and unwedded. It seems that we must wait for an apostle of pure beauty or a trumpeter of the people, a new Keats or an English Whitman. Meanwhile through the uproar of modern life there are to be heard - by those who have ears to hear - voices melodious enough, singing in accomplished numbers, and among these men is Mr Herbert Trench, a collection of whose poems, all that he esteems of worth, is now gathered in one volume and parcelled out into two sections, the lyrical and the narrative. This collection contains fourteen new odes, of which the best, as has always been remarked in this writer’s work, are in the erotic vein:

Nay since we sink like gallant ships
    Far out of sight of land,
Since we must melt like sandy smoke
    That blows along the strand,
Since we must bow and pass in grief
Like the rushes or the driven leaf,
O put not on my singing lips
    The proud seal of your hand!

Were the high heaven’s golden hosts
    Beneath our feet like these—
Had we outswept the shade of earth
    And the sad sound of her seas,
Our winged feet for ever meant
    Through a thousand lives to run,
Each with a new-dawned firmament
    Breaking from sun to sun—
How well with thee were I content
    For sole companion!
Only with thee and beauty blent,
    Always to journey on.

In this mood the poet is master of his subject, proudly moulding thought and emotion into form, giving permanence to the most swiftly fleeting moments of life; but, on the very next page, the note is forced, the thought is blurred, the emotion is violently handled, and violated, and debased to this:

I am all yours. I kneel, I burn.
    Feel every naked rushing nerve
And tendril of my being yearn
    For you: for you I starve.

Endless you yield what else none gives
    That torturing, acutest bliss,
That quenches self-hood while it lives
    Enheavened in your kiss.

Self-hood is very far from being quenched and, with the subtle vengeance which is always lying in wait for the poet who works at less than the topmost flight of his imagination, the form is marred and the falseness of the thing is revealed in every jagged line, betrayed beyond all possibility of doubt in the emphasis of the word enheavened, which is there only to lift the verse out of the bathos into which it had fallen. That is not utterly to condemn the poem called Be not afraid, for behind it there is genuine impulse and feeling. The endeavour is here to sift the genuinely poetic from the too deliberate, the confused, the earth-bound, and the self-confined. There are poems with which the critic can do no more than hitch his waggon to their star and only half-humorously complain when the star winks or he in the waggon is dragged through clouds; but there is no such poem in this collection. Edgar Allan Poe would have winced at the heaviness of the rhymes and the absence of true rhythm in the ode addressed to him:

And at last the songs confuted
of the vagabond sweet-luted
Celestial, persecuted,
       Poor mystagogue
       Or drunken rogue
Are by the world saluted.

On the other hand he would have appreciated and delighted in the true elegiac note in the Song for the Funeral of a Boy.

This ditty from the brake,
    This rainbow from the waters, fades; and light
That little pyre shall take
    In flame and cloud; but 0 when. the bloom of light 
          With breathless glow
          Along the tops of snow
Tells out to all the valleys night is done—
Think of the boy, ye young companions bright,
Not without joy; for he hath loved and gone
As dews that on the uplands shine and go!

Most sustained and best of all the new poems, clearest in vision and finest wrought is the Ode at Assouan on the Nile. Here is an individual utterance of an ancient dream, austere, bold, the very expression of human craving. Shelleian if you like, perhaps too idiotically simple an answer to an eternal question, but, all the same, noble. You may pass these poems through sieve after sieve of criticism, but that remains, that and some others; notably same of the now familiar verses such as Mounting the Hill, The Requital, Old Anchor Chantry, Jean Richepin’s Song, Bitter Serenade, etc. It were hard to tell how much of these narrative poems Deudic Wedded, The Queen of Gothland, and Apollo and the Seaman would remain after such a process as that suggested. They are very unequal, but in all there is the stuff of poetry. They hover too much between the lyric and the narrative and in none of them is the wide sweep and force of The Ancient Mariner, to which at least one of them owes kinship. This poet’s muse is futile, not from wantonness, but from failure in the poet’s ardour of wooing. He has a most notable lack of force which can be shown, even more clearly than by quotation, by a comparison, which he himself has challenged, of his poem on Shakespeare with the sonnets of George Meredith. The one speaks rather awkwardly “of madness whining in its shroudage slender” while the other, with the sympathy of force in triumph hailing force, cries:

Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoixred
    He knew thy sons. He proved from Hell to Hell
Of human passions, but of love deflowered
    His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well...

And then I think we touch another weakness in this poet. He embarks, not from any certain knowledge of Earth or the sons of Earth, not even with enough knowledge of the heavens by which to set his course, but rather in each voyage, each poem, sets out upon uncharted and unfamiliar seas to be at the mercy of the winds of his own thoughts. It is very certain that he has been carried to the Enchanted Isles and “on honey-dew bath fed,” but, taking the volume as a record of his journeys (and what else is any work of art ?), it is clear that he has met with foul weather, and been becalmed, and carried out of his track, and that all his misadventures are attributable to bad seamanship. That is not to say that Mr Trench is not a poet. He is, but a poet who has not struggled to disentangle his birthright from the curses of a malign fairy godmother who blessed him maliciously with fluency and an Irish ease of assimilation.                                                    G. C.