I quote at the end of this article the two poems, The Shepherd and My Poet, which seem to me, as a whole, to show Mr. Benson at his best. There are finer lines and stanzas in other poems, but these are, to my thinking, at once his most concrete and his most sustained efforts. Both, it will be seen, are portraits; both are entirely objective. Therein, I think, lies their superiority. It is not in his favourite exercises of reflection and introspection that Mr. Benson really shines. He is not a strong thinker, and if he feels deeply, he has not sufficient self-abandonment to give passionate utterance to his emotion. But he is a real artist : he sees things clearly and can depict them vividly. It is when he gets out of himself that he is at his best. There are, as I have above suggested, many directions in which he might get out of himself. Why should he not try them all and choose that, or those, which he finds best suited to his genius? THE SHEPHERD. The shepherd is an ancient man, His face is like the pippin, grown When tempests sweep the dripping plain, The storm-cloud's shattered edge. When frosts among the misty farms Short speech he hath for man and beast; There is no change he doth desire, He sits, and speaks no word. He holds no converse with his kind, On birds and beasts his mind is bent; Of kings and wars he doth not hear. And strange fowl he has seen. In Church, some muttering he doth make, Well-pleased when hymns harmonious rise He doth not strive to overtake The hurrying litanies. He hears the music of the wind, His prayer is brief, and scant his creed ; The shadow, and what lurks behind, He doth not greatly heed. MY POET. 1. He came; I met him face to face, But weakness fretting to be great, The tyrant of a sullen hour, He frowned away our mild content; And insight only gave him power To see the slights that were not meant. II. And was it, then, some trick of hand, Some deft mechanical control, That bridged the aching gulf, and spanned The roaring torrent of the soul? And when convention's trivial bond Was severed by the trenchant pen, The vision of that brutish king, A tortured dream at break of day, A monstrous, misbegotten thing, LAURENCE BINYON FROM Somewhat commonplace beginnings, Mr. Laurence Binyon has ripened into a poet of great promise and no inconsiderable performance. His Newdigate Poem of 1890, Persephone, was a Newdigate like any other. Save for a certain dignity of movement, it had nothing to distinguish it. His Lyric Poems of 1894 were gracefully contemplative and pleasantly Matthew-Arnoldish. There was still a good deal of feeble and commonplace work in them. He was still capable of writing: So, on the mountains, hapless Niobe Bewailed her children, by dread deities slain ; Those jealous deities whose bright shafts ne'er miss, He still thought it worth while not only to write-that is the common lot--but to publish such verses as these: Ask me not, dear, what thing it is My heart leaps when you look on me, I only know, I love you true; Since I am I, and you are you. But in many individual passages and phrases he already shows imaginative vision and verbal felicity. The admiration with which one reads such lines as these: The gathering dusk, and one pure star Deep in the visionary west, is tempered by the reflection that this solitary star has shone in many a poet's skies, if not in "the visionary west," at least in some cognate quarter of the heavens. Still, a poet can show his sense of beauty in his borrowings no less than in his inventions. Even the beautiful phrase (from an unnamed poem on London at night): Sleep, to how many spent-out spirits, yields Life's only sweetness, to forget they live, has somehow a familiar cadence. More convincingly original is the following from a poem entitled Tintagel: See ye, knights, your ancient home Waters rolled, and wrath of foam, Where the waves beneath your graves Snow themselves abroad in thunder. Here, again, are two stanzas from an otherwise rather commonplace poem of some length, which make a charming little lyric in themselves: Ah, now this happy month is gone, Not now, my heart, complain, He takes his own, the weeks, the hours, Seeds of imperishable flowers In fields of memory. |