Part 1
# Modern British Poetry ### By Unknown
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MODERN BRITISH POETRY
EDITED BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
Author of "_Challenge_," "_Including Horace_," "_Modern American Poetry_," etc.
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY RAHWAY, N. J.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For permission to reprint the material in this volume, the editor wishes, first of all, to acknowledge his debt to those poets whose co-operation has been of such assistance not only in finally determining upon the choice of their poems, but in collecting dates, biographical data, etc. Secondly, he wishes to thank the publishers, most of whom are holders of the copyrights. The latter indebtedness is specifically acknowledged to:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY and A. P. WATT & SON--
For "The Return" from _The Five Nations_ and for "An Astrologer's Song" from _Rewards and Fairies_ by Rudyard Kipling. Thanks also are due to Mr. Kipling himself for personal permission to reprint these poems.
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY and MARTIN SECKER--
For the poem from _Collected Poems_ by James Elroy Flecker.
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY--
For the poems from _The Old Huntsman_, _Counter-Attack_ and _Picture Show_ by Siegfried Sassoon.
FOUR SEAS COMPANY--
For poems from _War and Love_ by Richard Aldington and _The Mountainy Singer_ by Seosamh MacCathmhaoil (Joseph Campbell).
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY--
For poems from _Peacock Pie_ and _The Listeners_ by Walter de la Mare and _Poems_ by Edward Thomas.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY--
For two poems from _Poems, 1908-1919_, by John Drinkwater, both of which are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.
B. W. HUEBSCH--
For the selections from _Chamber Music_ by James Joyce, _Songs to Save a Soul_ and _Before Dawn_ by Irene Rutherford McLeod, _Amores, Look! We Have Come Through!_, and _New Poems_ by D. H. Lawrence.
ALFRED A. KNOPF--
For poems from _The Collected Poems of William H. Davies_, _Fairies and Fusiliers_ by Robert Graves, _The Queen of China and Other Poems_ by Edward Shanks, and _Poems: First Series_ by J. C. Squire.
JOHN LANE COMPANY--
For the selections from _Poems_ by G. K. Chesterton, _Ballads and Songs_ by John Davidson, _The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke_, _Admirals All_ by Henry Newbolt, _Herod_ and _Lyrics and Dramas_ by Stephen Phillips, _The Hope of the World and Other Poems_ by William Watson, and _In Cap and Bells_ by Owen Seaman.
THE LONDON MERCURY--
For "Going and Staying" by Thomas Hardy and "The House That Was" by Laurence Binyon.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY--
For the selections from _Fires_ and _Borderlands and Thoroughfares_ by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, _Poems_ by Ralph Hodgson, the sonnet from _Good Friday and Other Poems_ by John Masefield, and the passage (entitled in this volume "Rounding the Horn") from "Dauber" in _The Story of a Round-House_ by John Masefield.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS--
For the title poem from _In Flanders Fields_ by John McCrae.
THE POETRY BOOKSHOP (England)--
For two excerpts from _Strange Meetings_ by Harold Monro and for the poems from the biennial anthologies, _Georgian Poetry_.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS--
For the quotations from _Poems_ by William Ernest Henley.
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY--
For the poem from _Ardours and Endurances_ by Robert Nichols.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., as the representatives of B. H. BLACKWELL, of Oxford--
For a poem by Edith Sitwell from _The Mother_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY xi
THOMAS HARDY (1840- ) In Time of "The Breaking of Nations" 3 Going and Staying 4 The Man He Killed 4
ROBERT BRIDGES (1844- ) Winter Nightfall 5 Nightingales 7
ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY (1844-1881) Ode 8
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY (1849-1903) Invictus 10 The Blackbird 10 A Bowl of Roses 11 Before 11 Margaritae Sorori 12
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) Summer Sun 13 Winter-Time 14 Romance 15 Requiem 16
ALICE MEYNELL (1850- ) A Thrush Before Dawn 16
FIONA MACLEOD (_William Sharp_) (1855-1905) The Valley of Silence 18 The Vision 19
OSCAR WILDE (1856-1900) Requiescat 20 Impression du Matin 21
JOHN DAVIDSON (1857-1909) A Ballad of Hell 22 Imagination 26
WILLIAM WATSON (1858- ) Ode in May 28 Estrangement 30 Song 31
FRANCIS THOMPSON (1859-1907) Daisy 32 To Olivia 34 An Arab Love-Song 35
A. E. HOUSMAN (1859- ) Reveille 36 When I Was One-and-Twenty 37 With Rue My Heart is Laden 38 To An Athlete Dying Young 38 "Loveliest of Trees" 39
DOUGLAS HYDE (1860- ) I Shall Not Die for Thee 40
AMY LEVY (1861-1889) Epitaph 42 In the Mile End Road 42
KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON (1861- ) Sheep and Lambs 43 All-Souls 44
OWEN SEAMAN (1861- ) To An Old Fogey 45 Thomas of the Light Heart 47
HENRY NEWBOLT (1862- ) Drake's Drum 49
ARTHUR SYMONS (1865- ) In the Wood of Finvara 50 Modern Beauty 51
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865- ) The Lake Isle of Innisfree 53 The Song of the Old Mother 53 The Cap and Bells 54 An Old Song Resung 55
RUDYARD KIPLING (1865- ) Gunga Din 57 The Return 61 The Conundrum of the Workshops 63 An Astrologer's Song 66
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE (1866- ) A Ballad of London 69 Regret 70
LIONEL JOHNSON (1867-1902) Mystic and Cavalier 71 To a Traveller 73
ERNEST DOWSON (1867-1900) To One in Bedlam 74 You Would Have Understood Me 75
"A. E." (_George William Russell_) (1867- ) The Great Breath 76 The Unknown God 77
STEPHEN PHILLIPS (1868-1915) Fragment from "Herod" 78 Beautiful Lie the Dead 78 A Dream 79
LAURENCE BINYON (1869- ) A Song 79 The House That Was 80
ALFRED DOUGLAS (1870- ) The Green River 81
T. STURGE MOORE (1870- ) The Dying Swan 82 Silence Sings 82
WILLIAM H. DAVIES (1870- ) Days Too Short 84 The Moon 85 The Villain 85 The Example 86
HILAIRE BELLOC (1870- ) The South Country 87
ANTHONY C. DEANE (1870- ) The Ballad of the _Billycock_ 90 A Rustic Song 92
J. M. SYNGE (1871-1909) Beg-Innish 95 A Translation from Petrarch 96 To the Oaks of Glencree 96
NORA HOPPER CHESSON (1871-1906) A Connaught Lament 97
EVA GORE-BOOTH (1872- ) The Waves of Breffny 98 Walls 99
MOIRA O'NEILL A Broken Song 99 Beauty's a Flower 100
JOHN MCCRAE (1872-1918) In Flanders Fields 101
FORD MADOX HUEFFER (1873- ) Clair de Lune 102 There Shall Be More Joy 104
WALTER DE LA MARE (1873- ) The Listeners 106 An Epitaph 107 Tired Tim 108 Old Susan 108 Nod 109
G. K. CHESTERTON (1874- ) Lepanto 111 A Prayer in Darkness 118 The Donkey 119
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON (1878- ) Prelude 120 The Stone 121 Sight 124
JOHN MASEFIELD (1878- ) A Consecration 126 Sea-Fever 127 Rounding the Horn 128 The Choice 131 Sonnet 132
LORD DUNSANY (1878- ) Songs from an Evil Wood 133
EDWARD THOMAS (1878-1917) If I Should Ever By Chance 136 Tall Nettles 137 Fifty Faggots 137 Cock-Crow 138
SEUMAS O'SULLIVAN (1879- ) Praise 139
RALPH HODGSON Eve 140 Time, You Old Gipsy Man 142 The Birdcatcher 144 The Mystery 144
HAROLD MONRO (1879- ) The Nightingale Near the House 145 Every Thing 146 Strange Meetings 149
T. M. KETTLE (1880-1916) To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God 150
ALFRED NOYES (1880- ) Sherwood 151 The Barrel-Organ 154 Epilogue 161
PADRAIC COLUM (1881- ) The Plougher 162 An Old Woman of the Roads 164
JOSEPH CAMPBELL (_Seosamh MacCathmhaoil_) (1881- ) I Am the Mountainy Singer 165 The Old Woman 166
JAMES STEPHENS (1882- ) The Shell 167 What Tomas An Buile Said In a Pub 168 To the Four Courts, Please 169
JOHN DRINKWATER (1882- ) Reciprocity 170 A Town Window 170
JAMES JOYCE (1882- ) I Hear an Army 171
J. C. SQUIRE (1884- ) A House 172
LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE (1884- ) From "Vashti" 175 Song 176
JAMES ELROY FLECKER (1884-1915) The Old Ships 178
D. H. LAWRENCE (1885- ) People 180 Piano 180
JOHN FREEMAN (1885- ) Stone Trees 181
SHANE LESLIE (1886- ) Fleet Street 183 The Pater of the Cannon 183
FRANCES CORNFORD (1886- ) Preexistence 184
ANNA WICKHAM The Singer 186 Reality 186 Song 187
SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886- ) To Victory 189 Dreamers 190 The Rear-Guard 190 Thrushes 191 Aftermath 192
RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915) The Great Lover 195 Dust 198 The Soldier 200
W. M. LETTS (1887- ) Grandeur 201 The Spires of Oxford 203
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG Lochanilaun 204
F. S. FLINT London 205
EDITH SITWELL The Web of Eros 206 Interlude 207
F. W. HARVEY (1888- ) The Bugler 208
T. P. CAMERON WILSON (1889-1918) Sportsmen in Paradise 209
W. J. TURNER (1889- ) Romance 210
PATRICK MACGILL (1890) By-the-Way 211 Death and the Fairies 212
FRANCIS LEDWIDGE (1891-1917) An Evening in England 213 Evening Clouds 214
IRENE RUTHERFORD MCLEOD (1891- ) "Is Love, then, so Simple" 215 Lone Dog 215
RICHARD ALDINGTON (1892- ) Prelude 216 Images 217 At the British Museum 218
EDWARD SHANKS (1892- ) Complaint 219
OSBERT SITWELL (1892- ) The Blind Pedlar 220 Progress 221
ROBERT NICHOLS (1893- ) Nearer 222
CHARLES H. SORLEY (1895-1915) Two Sonnets 223 To Germany 225
ROBERT GRAVES (1895- ) It's a Queer Time 226 A Pinch of Salt 227 I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned? 228 The Last Post 229
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND POEMS 231
INTRODUCTORY
_The New Influences and Tendencies_
Mere statistics are untrustworthy; dates are even less dependable. But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call "modern" English literature may be said to date from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly "of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, (7) The war and the appearance of "The Georgians." It may be interesting to trace these developments in somewhat greater detail.
THE END OF VICTORIANISM
The age commonly called Victorian came to an end about 1885. It was an age distinguished by many true idealists and many false ideals. It was, in spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, not universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt and tinsel; its realism was as cheap as its showy glass pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimacassars. The period was full of a pessimistic resignation (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) and a kind of cowardice or at least a negation which, refusing to see any glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, King Arthur, the legend of Troy--to the suave surroundings of a dream-world instead of the hard contours of actual experience.
At its worst, it was a period of smugness, of placid and pious sentimentality--epitomized by the rhymed sermons of Martin Farquhar Tupper, whose _Proverbial Philosophy_ was devoured with all its cloying and indigestible sweetmeats by thousands. The same tendency is apparent, though far less objectionably, in the moralizing lays of Lord Thomas Macaulay, in the theatrically emotionalized verses of Robert Buchanan, Edwin Arnold and Sir Lewis Morris--even in the lesser later work of Alfred Tennyson.
And, without Tupper's emptiness or absurdities, the outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the merest trickle--and diluted it.
The poets of a generation before this time were fired with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of nature, an insatiable hunger for truth in all its forms and manifestations. The characteristic poets of the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, "wrote under the dominance of churchliness, of 'sweetness and light,' and a thousand lesser theories that have not truth but comfort for their end."
The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period had already begun; the best of Victorianism can be found not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, William Morris, who were completely out of sympathy with their time.
But it was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now famous 'nineties toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion a beauty whose existence was its "own excuse for being." Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use of aestheticism as a slogan; the battle-cry of the group was actually the now outworn but then revolutionary "Art for Art's sake"! And, so sick were people of the shoddy ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate past, that the slogan won. At least, temporarily.
THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE AESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY
_The Yellow Book_, the organ of a group of young writers and artists, appeared (1894-97), representing a reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and influenced by the French. The group of contributors was a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary airs and prim romantics of the Victorian Era.
Almost the first act of the "new" men was to rouse and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of-the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and natural an impulse, still has a place of its own--especially as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid-Victorian propriety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and energetic audacities of the sensational younger authors and artists; the old walls fell; the public, once so apathetic to _belles lettres_, was more than attentive to every phase of literary experimentation. The last decade of the nineteenth century was so tolerant of novelty in art and ideas, that it would seem, says Holbrook Jackson in his penetrative summary, _The Eighteen-Nineties_, "as though the declining century wished to make amends for several decades of artistic monotony. It may indeed be something more than a coincidence that placed this decade at the close of a century, and _fin de siecle_ may have been at once a swan song and a death-bed repentance."
But later on, the movement (if such it may be called), surfeited with its own excesses, fell into the mere poses of revolt; it degenerated into a half-hearted defense of artificialities.
It scarcely needed W. S. Gilbert (in _Patience_) or Robert Hichens (in _The Green Carnation_) to satirize its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other.... The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of many of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose--not because it was erotic.... It was a passing mood which gave the poetry of the hour a hothouse fragrance; a perfume faint yet unmistakable and strange."
But most of the elegant and disillusioned young men overshot their mark. Mere health reasserted itself; an inherent repressed vitality sought new channels. Arthur Symons deserted his hectic Muse, Richard Le Gallienne abandoned his preciosity, and the group began to disintegrate. The aesthetic philosophy was wearing thin; it had already begun to fray and reveal its essential shabbiness. Wilde himself possessed the three things which he said the English would never forgive--youth, power and enthusiasm. But in trying to make an exclusive cult of beauty, Wilde had also tried to make it evade actuality; he urged that art should not, in any sense, be a part of life but an escape from it. "The proper school to learn art in is not Life--but Art." And in the same essay ("The Decay of Lying") he wrote, "All bad Art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals." Elsewhere he said, "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has discovered."
Such a cynical and decadent philosophy could not go unchallenged. Its aristocratic blue-bloodedness was bound to arouse the red blood of common reality. This negative attitude received its answer in the work of that yea-sayer, W. E. Henley.
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
Henley repudiated this languid aestheticism; he scorned a negative art which was out of touch with the world. His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that mere existence was glorious; life was coarse, difficult, often dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hungers of man; it could not flourish only on its own essences or technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would have to share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the prosaic world. And so Henley came like a swift salt breeze blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of the joy of living and the courage of the "unconquerable soul." He was a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a critic and editor. In the latter capacity he gathered about him such men as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, T. E. Brown, J. M. Barrie. None of these men were his disciples, but none of them came into contact with him without being influenced in some way by his sharp and positive personality. A pioneer and something of a prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor Rodin.
If at times Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscular and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for nobility in whatever cause it was joined. He never disdained the actual world in any of its moods--bus-drivers, hospital interiors, scrubwomen, a panting train, the squalor of London's alleys, all found a voice in his lines--and his later work contains more than a hint of the delight in science and machinery which was later to be sounded more fully in the work of Rudyard Kipling.
THE CELTIC REVIVAL AND J. M. SYNGE
In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his _Wanderings of Oisin_; in the same year Douglas Hyde, the scholar and folk-lorist, brought out his _Book of Gaelic Stories_.
The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish literature may be said to date from the publication of those two books. The fundamental idea of both men and their followers was the same. It was to create a literature which would express the national consciousness of Ireland through a purely national art. They began to reflect the strange background of dreams, politics, suffering and heroism that is immortally Irish. This community of fellowship and aims is to be found in the varied but allied work of William Butler Yeats, "A. E." (George W. Russell), Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, Padraic Colum and others. The first fervor gone, a short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new significance, it seemed for a while that the movement would lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the tramp, followed; an interest that was something of a reaction against the influence of Yeats and his mystic otherworldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic Revival reached its height with John Millington Synge, who was not only the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote such contrary critics as George Moore and Harold Williams) "one of the greatest dramatists who has written in English." Synge's poetry, brusque and all too small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to serve as a bold banner--a sort of a brilliant Jolly Roger--for the younger men of the following period. It was not only this dramatist's brief verses and his intensely musical prose but his sharp prefaces that were to exercise such an influence.
In the notable introduction to the _Playboy of the Western World_, Synge declared, "When I was writing _The Shadow of the Glen_ some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter is, I think, of some importance; for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words--and at the same time to give the reality which is at the root of all poetry, in a natural and comprehensive form." This quotation explains his idiom, possibly the sharpest-flavored and most vivid in modern literature.
As to Synge's poetic power, it is unquestionably greatest in his plays. In _The Well of the Saints_, _The Playboy of the Western World_ and _Riders to the Sea_ there are more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan times. Yeats, when he first heard Synge's early one-act play, _The Shadow of the Glen_, is said to have exclaimed "Euripides." A half year later when Synge read him _Riders to the Sea_, Yeats again confined his enthusiasm to a single word:--"AEschylus!" Years have shown that Yeats's appreciation was not as exaggerated as many might suppose.
But although Synge's poetry was not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to his _Poems_ he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and at the same time a classic _credo_ for all that we call the "new" poetry. "I have often thought," it begins, "that at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, using 'poetic' in the same special sense. The poetry of exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops.... Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successfully by itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood."
RUDYARD KIPLING