A Poet in the Making
1
WHEN A. E. H.’s Shropshire Lad had without question begun to make its mark in the literary world, a friend asked him whether, while he was writing it, he knew how good and original it was. “Yes,” he replied, “I did think so, because it was so totally different from anything I had written before.”
That statement is fully borne out by those of his earlier poems which are still in existence not only those written in boyhood from the age of fourteen, or thereabouts, but also those which he produced during his undergraduate days at Oxford, when his taste in literature had become more developed and when classical scholarship had begun to be his main interest. Where else, indeed, is any anticipation of the style and sentiment of A Shropshire Lad to be found in English poetry? I have come across only two instances: the first is the Dirge in Cymbeline: —
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
The second is, of all unexpected writers, by Samuel Johnson! Was he writing prophetically? The title of the poem is “Imitation of the Style of — ” (the name is left blank); and in spite of its eighteenth-century flavor, it is not a bad imitation of what A. E. H. might have written had he lived in that period: —
Wearing out life’s evening gray,
Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way.”
Scarce repressed the starting tear;
When the hoary sage replied:
“Come, my lad, and drink some beer!”
How early A. E. H. started writing poetry we only know from his answer, quite late in life, to the inquiry of a French correspondent: “I wrote verse at eight or earlier, but very little until I was thirty-live.” That is an understatement, due perhaps to loss of interest in material which had for him no subsequent value. Between fourteen and eighteen he had written a good deal; and if one includes nonsense verse, his output during that period was considerable; indeed, if bulk counted for anything, he had set out to be a writer of comic verse, in which he might have achieved a reputation alongside the author of The Bab Ballads.
About the earliest poem which can be approximately dated as written before rather than after fourteen was a humorous address to an aunt on her second marriage. It exists only in my own memory, and will die with me, as it is not good enough to quote as a whole. Its chief merit was an ingenious tagging of rhymes for the refrain “Honi soit qui mal y pense” with which each verse ended.
The first verse ran thus: —
Lost her garter at the dance,
Then they coined the motto “Honi
Soit qui mal y pense.”
The second verse: —
In the language used in France —
Write, and send you “Honi soit qui
Mal y pense.”
The third verse: —
Your espousals to enhance —
Send you “Honi soit qui mal y
Pense.”
Ingenious rhymes, such as these, were a constant feature of his light verse, produced for the most part during the twenty minutes allowed while the family exercised itself over “End Rhymes,” or “Nouns and Questions,” or on the writing of verses which had to include an assortment, of nouns supplied by each member of the family. Sometimes, while the rest of us were writing one, Alfred would write two. His best (of which he thought well enough years later to allow me to publish it during his lifetime) ran as follows (I have italicized the nouns which had to be brought in):
Reading a novel I sat;
And as I was reading the novel
A gnat flew away with my hat:
As fast as a fraudulent banker,
Away with my hat it fled,
And calmly came to an anchor
In the midst of the cucamher-bed.
I went and purchased a yacht,
And traversed the garden tank;
And I gave it that insect hot
When I got to the other bank;
Of its life I made an abridgment
By squeezing it somewhat flat;
And I cannot think what that midge meant
By flying away with my hat.
Here, evidently, the whole poem grew out of abridgment: he devised a rhyme to it which brought a gnat into the story; and gnat rhyming with hat suggested the plol; and by finding a rhyme to all but one of the selected nouns, he built up the story point by point.
2
POEMS of this sort he wrote by the dozen, and we kept them for later delight. Serious poems he may also have written in equal numbers; but I don’t think so, for in those days our literary productions were common property; only in later years did he become reticent and secretive, and relinquish the leadership which we had followed so willingly. It was that leadership in all our games and devices which probably caused him, many years later, to say, “Was there ever such an interesting family?" because at that time he was certainly its main interest; and he was very much interested in himself.
Our favorite paper game was “Nouns and Questions.” Each wrote on one piece of paper a noun, on another a question; these were shuffled and then distributed, to each of us a question and a noun; and we were given twenty minutes in which to answer the question in rhyme, bringing in the noun — which generally, by malicious intention, was made difficult. At this game Alfred’s rhyming ingenuity and speed of composition were remarkable. I give two specimens which have remained in my memory through all the seventy years since they were written.
The first, I must explain, was composed in 1876 just before the Russo-Turkish War, when the proTurkish policy of Lord Beaconsfield (who was at that time Prime Minister) was being violently denounced by Mr. Gladstone, and the Bulgarian massacres, charged against the Turkish bashibazouks, had become a bone of contention between the Liberal and Tory parlies. The question was: “If you were a bird, what bird would you be, what would you do, and where would you locate yourself?” and the noun was “Antimacassar.” And this is how Alfred tackled the problem of bringing in a noun so incongruous to the question: —
And what should I have but a wattle —
A wattle to grow on my throttle —
A wattle to change like an opal?
My looks should be gloomy and murky;
My tail should be lively and perky;
And my home should be Constantinople.
An Ottoman (Cos I am called so)
My throne and my footstool should be;
My beak, and my Beaconsfield also,
Should be the protectors of me.
I would laugh at the onsets of Russia;
My protectors would certainty crush her,
She never should cause me to stir.
With wonderful ease I would smash her.
Armed with an Antimacassar,
And a fine new Bulgarian Massa-
Cre.
Here is the other pair, which presented a similar incongruity between noun and question:
Question: Have oysters whiskers as well as beards?
Noun: Cucumber.
While cucumbers grow on the land;
And the oyster is slightly the moister
As most people well understand.
And the reason I mentioned the fact was
That oyster and moister will rhyme,
And that ‘cucumber’ that word exact was
The one to be brought in this time.
And therefore, with joy the most boisterous,
I conclude with the prudent remark
That, as to the whiskers of oysters,
I am totally quite in the dark.
Concerning my brother’s speed of composition, I remember a very amusing instance. An aunt who was staying with us had received the question: “What do you most like doing?” and the noun “Acme.” And this was her brief answer: —
Around the Park, when days are bright.
With fair companion by my side,
I deem the Acme of delight.
This, along with the rest, was passed up to Alfred, for the final reading aloud. It was bis custom, to get over difficulties of handwriting, to read them through to himself first.
In the short interval while we were waiting, he added to our aunt’s lines the following: —
But not for sordid gain, or pelf;
I long for lunacy, that I
May be beside myself.
Was it any wonder that, with such a gift for amusing impromptus, Alfred was the leader in all our recreational pursuits?
3
UNDER Alfred’s guidance, we became a very literary family — in quantity if not in quality. New projects, which were seldom finished, were constantly cropping up. We started writing a novel, each of us supplying a character. Alfred’s was the villain; mine was a clergyman with a long beard (I gave him a beard because my clerical godfather had one). Directly he heard of the beard, Alfred devised that in his own beard the villain should strangle him. The novel got no further than the lirst number of the Family Magazine, which contained also riddles and rhymes. After that we started writing a new “History of Europe" — a fictional one — mainly in order to form alliances and embark on a European war, in which Alfred, impersonating Napoleon and choosing France for his country (with all the rest of us in alliance against him), so maneuvered us to his will that he won all his battles with an ease which destroyed interest. When some of us began to see through his artfulness, the “History" died an early death.
But it was years earlier, and over poetry, that we were really communal, sometimes writing composite poems, to which each contributed a verse—with rather patchwork results—in different meters of our own choosing. The only one I can now remember was a poem on Death, which began: —
And every person ought
To think of it with reverence,
Before they go for ever hence.
That, which was quite the best verse, was by one of my sisters, who did really write her own poems, at a time when some of us, unconsciously, had our poems written for us by Alfred. Whether he contributed to that poem I cannot be sure; if he did, memory of it has gone.
The Family Album of Verse, to which we were all contributors, started when Alfred was fourteen; and I think now that the real reason for its existence was that he had more poems on hand than he knew what to do with: he wanted us to have the pleasure of them, and himself the pleasure of hearing them admired, but he preferred not to claim the authorship of those which he did not think quite up to his standard. And so, with promptings more or less extensive, those of us who were too young to know better became the authors of his superfluous poems; and though at that time I did not know what a sonnet was, I produced one entitled “Evening,” and can remember, even now, the difficulty Alfred had in extracting from me the first line. which ran (I have forgotten all the others): “The swan is sleeping on the river’s breast.” He asked me to name a suitable bird; but I could only think of ducks and geese, so he had to supply the swan; and I have no doubt now that he supplied the rest of the poem as well.
There was one duplication of a subject, which has a curious explanation. A narrative poem called “The Cruise of the Arrow" appeared in two versions, under the names of our two sisters. Clemence wrote her own; Kate, who was younger, had a good deal of hers written for her. In the Family Magazine, Alfred wrote a review of the two poems, in which he said that the poem by the younger was decidedly the better. Perhaps it was; if so, we know the reason why.
All these poems — good, bad, and indifferent - were copied out by Alfred himself. He was indeed the sole family amanuensis for all our composite productions: no other handwriting went into the Family Album. He seems to have had a curious fondness for copying out poetry, for not only did he write out all the family compositions, however poor, but at the age of sixteen, or thereabouts, started a commonplace-book, into which he copied seventy-two of what presumably were then his favorite poems and which ran to 159 pages, done with great neatness and accuracy, and containing no more than three erasures from first to last. It was a somewhat conventional selection, not showing much originality of choice: Tennyson and Shelley topped the list with nine poems each; then came Wordsworth, Keats, and Swinburne, with five; Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron with four; Coleridge with three. The other entries (single, with one exception) included Burns, Hood, Scott, Collins, Southey, Macaulay, Beddoes, Poe, and Matthew Arnold. Toward the end (at the age of nineteen or thereabouts, judging from the handwriting) there was more originality of choice; it included translations from Goethe and Klopstock, and poems by Barry Cornwall, Owen Meredith, Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. For Christina he retained a great admiration in later life, venturing the opinion that she might some day come to rank higher than Swinburne. This book he took with him to Oxford, where he added to it its main feature of interest: four long extracts (filling thirty-four pages — one fifth of the whole) from the Poems and Romances (1869) of George Augustus Simcox — a now almost forgotten poet.
I am fairly sure that the admiration which this seems to indicate was not a lasting one; but one of the four extracts—a ballad of two lovers approaching the borders of Hell does, in subject at least, and in some of its descriptive imagery, suggest that A. E. H. was still influenced by that piece of his early choosing when he came to write “Hell’s Gate,”a poem different in style and treatment from all his others, and also written in the same meter as the Simcox ballad.
But the only contemporary poet whose influence Alfred admitted in after years was Matthew Arnold; and it was because he felt it to be somewhat derivative that he decided not to include “The Sage to the Young Man” either in A Shropshire Lad or in Last Poems; but as I considered it not inferior to some of the poems he did include, I was able (under the terms of the directions he left for my guidance) to include it in More Poems.
This poem was written some years before ” Bredon Hill,” the earliest of the Shropshire Lad poems. I do not myself find it more derivative than others. For those who have not read the poem, I give the first, third, and last verses: —
Whose loins are girt to gain
The hell-defended height
Where virtue beckons plain;
Endure, be strong and strive;
But think not, O my son,
To save thy soul alive.
On, for thine hour is short.
It may be thou shalt gain
The hell-defended fort.
4
THE only quite early poem which gives any foretaste of A Shropshire Lad’s love of nature appeared in the Family Album in or about the year 1874 (when Alfred was fifteen), under the title “Summer”: —
A noonday haze of heat expands.
The gentle breeze along the meadows
Lifts a few leaflets on the trees,
But cannot stir the clouds that lie
Motionless on the dreaming sky,
And cannot shift the sleeping shadows
As motionless upon the leas.
Summer: and after summer, what?
All, happy trees, that know it not.
Would that with us it might be so!
And yet the broad-flung beech-tree heaves
Through all its slanting layer of leaves
With something of a sigh. Ah, no!
’Tis but the wind that with its breath
To them so softly murmureth:
For them hath still new sweets in store,
And sings new music evermore.
Only to us its tones seem sighs,
Only to us it prophecies
Of coming Autumn, coming death.
Of about the same date is a family competition poem on the ruins of Rome, which, though quite conventional in treatment, shows more mastery of form: —
That once was alive and divine;
And here stands the shaft of a column,
And there lies the wreck of a shrine;
But the wild bird still sings in the marshes,
The wild flower still blooms on the lea,
And under its infinite arches
The river runs down to the sea.
A time which is long overworn —
Saw Rome sinking down into embers,
And flowed by her when she was born:
When the people were gathered for slaughter
With Lucumo’s princes and Lars,
And the bridge fell splashing the water
High up to the turrets of Mars.
Another competition poem — more characteristic of what was to follow in later years, and which A. E. H. himself thought the better, was one with “The Oak” for its subject: —
Who knows how many years ago,
How many years of nights and days?
Perhaps when over woodland ways
The hoary Druid came and broke
The consecrated mistletoe.
And bears an acorn of its own,
That ripens in its fairy cup,
Looking at heaven; and being grown
Falls rustling to the autumn-meadow;
And pigs arise and eat it up.
A year later, for a composite play—which got. no further than the first act and a few fragments of later scenes — entitled “The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey,” Alfred wrote this song for Lady Jane to sing in prison the night before her death:
One regretful breath.
One lament for life that lingers
Round the doors of death.
For the frost has killed the rose,
And our summer dies in snows,
And our morning once for all
Gathers to the evenfall.
Sing no songs again;
For the reaper stays his reaping
On the darkened plain;
And the day has drained its cup,
And the twilight cometh up;
Song and sorrow all that are
Slumber at the even-star.
In the following year, between the ages o( sixteen and seventeen, Alfred wrote a translation in verse of Horace’s Ode XI, Book III, on Danäus daughter, Hypermnestra, which did not find its way into the Family Album. But on going to Oxford he left a copy behind him; and some years later our father, who had an amiable weakness for regarding himself as part author of anything we wrote which did credit to his parentage, got hold of it, made a few alterations (on which Alfred commented subsequently that he did not think they were improvements), and published it over his own initials in the local paper. It was a competent piece of schoolwork, but not remarkable; and as Alfred showed no wish to reclaim the credit of it, I do not reproduce it here.
5
WHAT did find publication in a more authentic form, and with the author’s consent, were the two school prize poems, written, the first in 1874, the second in the year following. Of the first, on “The Death of Socrates,”these last ten lines were about the best:—
With sorrow, unto them no dawn has come,
On them no lifted veil has shed the light;
With lisping thought and visionary sight
They wait in twilight. But the day shall be
When a frail bark shall bear across the sea
One, in the wisdom of whose solemn eyes
A deeper, clearer well of light shall rise,
And on the hill thy feet so oft have trod,
He shall in fullness preach thine UNKNOWN GOD.
The second — its subject “Paul on Mars’ Hill” — was of better quality, but still (restricted to the meter prescribed for all school poems at that date) only conventional in treatment and feeling. Unfortunately no copy of this poem has been kept. The issue of the local newspaper which contained it is missing, and that which was in the British Museum Newspaper Department was blitzed out of existence during the war.
Speaking of these poems in years long after, Alfred expressed the belief that one which he wrote in 1873, and which did not get the prize, was the best of the three. The poem, which still exists in his boyish handwriting, by no means bears this out. Its subject is “Sir Walter Raleigh”; it is exceedingly jingoish in tone — “England shall reign where’er the sun” being its prevailing note — and these four lines of adverse criticism on the character of James I are the only ones worth quoting: —
Down to the meanness of his mind,
A man to coming times exempt
From every feeling but contempt.
During his first year at Oxford, Alfred wrote and published (but not under his own name) a few poems and articles of inferior quality about which in later years he said he would be much obliged to me if I would refrain from reprinting them, and leave them to the oblivion they deserved. About the same date he produced, for the delectation of the family, a short story containing several poems of very much better quality—“A Morning with the Royal Family,” which was subsequently published without his permission in our school magazine, the Bromsgrovian. This jeu d’esprit he wrote while at home during the Christmas vacation of 1879. And I am inclined to think that he devised it as an omnium gatherum of verses which he had previously written, and which he regarded as sufficiently good for family consumption. He brought them into the story by making his fictitious King go to see how his son, Prince Henry, was getting on with his lessons; and one after another the Prince recites them for his father’s admiration. The first, inspired by Longfellow, ran as follows: —
And the rain was falling faster,
When through an Alpine village passed
An Alpine village pastor —
A youth who bore, mid snow and ice,
A bird that wouldn’t chirrup,
And a banner with the strange device,
“Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup.”
“My bold, my desperate feller:
Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
And you’ll want your umbereller;
And the roaring torrent is deep and wide —
You can hear how loud it washes.”
But still that clarion voice replied:
“I’ve got my old galoshes.”
(For the wind blows from the nor’ward)
Thy weary head upon my breast;
And please don’t think I’m forward!”
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
And he gladly would have tarried;
But still he answered with a sigh:
“Unhappily, I’m married!”
This was followed by a poem, less derivative in character, which I believe I am able to quote correctly, though I have not read the original for over thirty years: —
Among the grassy hay,
Oh, there I met an old man
Whose nerve had given way
. His heels were in an ant’s nest,
His head was in a tree,
And his arms went round and round and round,
And he squealed repeatedly.
And attended to his wants:
I put his heels into the tree,
And his head among the ants;
I tied his hands with a bootlace,
And I filled his mouth with hay,
And I said, “Good-bye; fine morning;
Many happy returns of the day!”
And his arms would not go round;
Yet he did not leave off making
A discontented sound.
I gazed at him a little while,
As I walked among the trees;
And I said, “When old men’s nerves give way,
How hard they are to please!”
And here finally (out of a total of seven, I give what I think are the three best) is a dirge on the death of a dancing dervish — a characteristic example of A. E. H.’s delight in the invention of fantastic rhymes: —
Eating ipecacuanha while you listen to my song!
Oh, play the bag-pipe mellow, and the flute and violin-
cello,
And the tea tray, and the bellow, and the poker and
the tong.
giddy,
And you’ll leave your wife a widdy, and tears will fill
my eyes.”
But, in spite of all my cautions, he continued his
contortions,
Till he broke himself in portions of an unimportant
size.
clever,
Though you never never never would appreciate my
songs.
But it did not make me jealous, and I’ll dig your grave
most zealous,
With the tea tray, and the bellows, and the poker, and
the tongs.
6
A YEAR or two later he contributed to the Bromsgrovian a dramatic parody which he thought good enough to initial, and of which an amended version appeared many years after in the Cornhill Magazine. I still prefer the earlier version, which is here reprinted for the first time: —
FRAGMENT OF A GREEK TRAGEDY
ALCMAEON and CHORUS
Cho. O gracefully-enveloped-in-a-cloak
Head of a stranger, wherefore, seeking what,
Whence, by what way, how purposed are you come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My cause of asking is, I wish to know.
But if perchance, from being deaf and dumb,
You cannot understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.
Ale. I journeyed hither on Ambracian road.
Cho. Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
Alc. Plying with speed my partnership of knees.
Cho. Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alc. Mud’s sister, not himself, adorns my legs.
Cho. Your name I not unwillingly would learn.
Alc. Not all that men desire do they obtain. Cho. Might I then know at what your presence aims?
Alc. A shepherd’s questioned tongue informed me that —
Cho. What? for I know not yet what you will say.
Alc. — this house was Eriphyle’s, no one’s else.
Cho. Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.
Alc. Might I then enter, going through the door?
Cho. Go; drag into the house a lucky foot;
And, O my son, be on the one hand good,
And do not on the other hand be bad.
And then thou wilt be like the man who speaks,
And not unlike thine interlocutor.
Alc. I go into the house with legs and speed.
CHORDS
(Strophe)
For ill-digested thought;
But, after pondering much.
To this conclusion I at last have come:
Life is uncertain.
This I have written deep
In my reflective midriff,
On tablets not of wax.
Nor with a stylus did I write it there,
For obvious reasons: Life, I say, is not
Divested of uncertainty.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This truth did I discover.
Nor did the Delphian tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.
(Antistrophe)
The Inachian daughter, loved of Zeus,
Her whom of old the gods.
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for:
And sent her forth to learn
The unaccustomed science
Of how to chew the cud?
She, therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle tops,
Nor did they disagree with her;
But yet, however wholesome, such repasts,
Myself, I deem unpleasant.
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? I repeat.
I have no notion why.
(Epode)
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A most displeasing tune?
Nay even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes,
The right one as well as the left,
Like a slaughter-house, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I, therefore, in a Cissian strain lament,
And with the rapid,
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.
Eriphyle (within). Oh, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw!
In deed, I mean, and not in word alone.
Cho. Methinks I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the accent of festivity.
Erip. He cracks my skull, not in a friendly way:
It seems he purposes to kill me dead.
Cho. I would not he considered rash, but yet
I doubt if all is well within the house.
Erip. Oh, oh, another blow! this makes the third:
He stabs my heart, a harsh unkindly act.
Cho. Indeed, if that be so, ill-fated one,
I fear we scarce can hope thou wilt survive.
7
EXCEPT for three translations which he contributed to A. W. Pollard’s edition of Odes from the Greek Dramatists (1890), this parody was for a good many years Alfred’s only experiment in the dramatic form. But when, in 1907, he heard that I was engaged in writing the libretto of an opera, he sent me —wishing to be helpful, and calling it “Model for young librettists” the following:
FRAGMENT OF AN ENGLISH OPERA
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Father (bass) Mother (contralto) Daughter (soprano)
SCENE: A room
TIME: Evening
Father Retire, my daughter;
Prayers have been said:
Take your warm water,
And go to bed.
Daughter But I had rather
Sit up instead.
Father I am your father,
So go to bed!
Daughter Are you my father?
Father I think so, rather:
You go to bed.
Mother My daughter, vanish;
You hear me speak:
This is not Spanish,
Nor is it Greek.
Daughter Oh, what a bother;
Would I were dead.
Mother I am your mother,
So go to bed.
Daughter Are you my mother?
Mother You have no other:
You go to bed.
Father Take your bed-candle,
And take it quick;
This is the handle.
Daughter Is this the handle?
Father No. that’s the wick.
This is the handle,
At this end here.
Take your bed-candle
And disappear.
Daughter Oh clear, oh dear!
Father & Take your warm water
Mother As we have said;
You are our daughter,
So go to bed. Daughter Am I your daughter?
Father the If not, you oughter:
Mother You go to bed.
Daughter (And I am then their the daughter, daughter sums it all up)
If not I oughter:
Prayers have been said.
This is my mother;
I have no other:
Would I were dead.
This is my father;
He thinks so, rather:
Oh dear, oh dear.
I take my candle;
This is the handle:
Father & I disappear.
Mother The coast is clear.
This was almost collaboration, though I cannot say that it gave me much help over the job which I then had in hand. Once, and once only, did he collaborate in the writing of one of my poems. In 1898 I sent to him for criticism my rhymed version of “’The Story of the Seven Young Goslings.” He approved of it as a whole, but proposed the following alternative for one quite bad couplet, dealing with the widowing of the Mother Goose: —
And the painful event had completely unmanned her.”
I accepted it gratefully: and friends to whom I have revealed the origin of those two lines assure me that they are the best in the whole poem.
Once when we were corresponding about sea poems (I had sent him a passage from a poem by George Darley which he admired) he wrote to me as follows: “ The sea is a subject, by no means exhausted. I have somewhere a poem which directs attention to one of its most striking characteristics, which hardly any of the poets seem to have observed. They call it ‘salt,’ and ‘blue,’ and ‘deep,’ and ‘dark,’and so on: but they never make such profoundly true reflections as the following: —
How wet, how wet ye are!
When first my gaze ye met
I said, ‘Those waves are wet.’
I said it, and am quite
Convinced that I was right.
Who saith that ye are dry, —
I give that man the lie.
Thy wetness, O thou sea,
Is wonderful to me.
It agitates my heart
To think how wet thou art.
No object I have met
Is more profoundly wet.
Methinks ‘twere vain to try,
O sea, to wipe thee dry.
I therefore will refrain
Farewell, thou humid main.”
During his four years at Oxford, he only wrote, so far as I have been able to discover, three serious poems, one of which was a translation. In 1882 he entered for the Newdigate Poem Prize, but did not get it. The subject set for that year was “Iona.” The poem that he wrote is no longer in existence; it was never published, and I do not think he ever showed it to any of the family. At the head of his composition he placed the four lines of Latin verse which here follow, and underneath, his translation of them: —
Justificam nobis mentem avertere deorum,
Quare nec tales dignantur visere coetus
Nec se contingi patiuntur lumine claro.
Have turned from earth the high gods’ eyes away;
So they with sons of men no more commune,
Revisiting the glimpses of the moon.
The two other poems which he wrote and published while he was at Oxford are to be found in the Collected Poems: the translation entitled “Parta Quies,” in More Poems; and the poem of fourteen stanzas (first published in Waifs and Strays, an Oxford magazine, in 1881) that bears the title “New Year’s Eve.” It would, therefore, be unnecessary to quote either of them here, were it not for the fact that this last-named poem, though not, perhaps, of outstanding merit, is of very significant importance for our understanding of A.E.H.’s poetic development both in thought and technique.
It was, in the first place, a definite farewell to Christianity; he had by then become a deist, on his way to a still wider separation from any form of religious belief. His two school poems had shown a conventional and rather insincere acceptance of religion, but now the mask was off. In style and technique “New Year’s Eve" has considerable affinity with the decorative and semi-archaic use of the English language which, under the influence of Rossetti and Swinburne, was then very much the vogue. A few years before his death he told me that, though he thought he could have written in that style better than most of its practitioners, he had abandoned it because it seemed to him to lead nowhere.
It would appear, therefore, that lie must have experimented in that direction; but this is the only poem he has left to us which gives any indication of it. After that poem, written when be was twenty, he never wrote another (except for translations) to which he cared to put his name; possibly having decided that poetry of that kind led nowhere, he did not write anything more until — some twelve years later — he wrote “The Sage to the Young Man,” then “Bredon Hill,” and then, quite suddenly and all together, the rest of his Shropshire Lad poems — so different, as he realized, from any he had written previously, and all practically within a year.
“New Year’s Eve,” written when he was only twenty, gave proof of its writer’s ability to be a poet of a very different kind from what he became later, and in that kind to make a considerable reputation, as the few verses which are here quoted are sufficient to show: —
From out of the west comes cold;
Down ruins the ancient order
And empire budded of old.
With psalm and censers alight:
Look thou never so keenly
Thou shalt not find us to-night.
With sands not many to run;
Divinities disanointed
And kings whose kingdom is done.
All kindreds under the sky;
We were gods and implored and immortal
Then; and to-day we die.”
They worshipped and took no rest,
Singing old tunes and saying
“We have seen his star in the west,”
Set to wild farewells;
And I left them there at their altars
Ringing their own dead knells.
From all the foregoing quotations, so varied in kind, one might almost say that A. E. H. had in him the making of three poets: a poet of comic verse, good enough to bring him reputation but not fame; a poet of the Victorian convention, who might have ranked respectably alongside others whose poems, though one still reads them with pleasure, have become dated; and lastly — though of this my quotations give very little evidence the poet of such outstanding originality that he actually became.
It is surely almost a unique case in the history of poetry that only at the age of thirty-five did the real poet appear, and become the creator of verse quite different from and so much better than any that he had written before.