Some Trends in Contemporary English Poetry ^l

BY P. R. KAIKINI

Like many other things, poetry, if it is the genuine and real thing and not an emanation in vacuo, is a living, organic product, which grows naturally out of the surroundings and bears the impress of the time and place and the circumstances wherein it happens to be conceived, and developed. Above all, it reflects, much as all literature does and will always do, the life of a people and is therefore relative and never absolute. It was D. H. Lawrence who, I believe, said something like that about Truth, and the dictum holds good even in the case of poetry as in that of all things of the spirit or all those that are the expression of man’s immortal spirit.

The World War wrought many changes in many persons, places and things, and so it brought to this country a few artists, writers and poets, some good and others bad or indifferent. We shall concern ourselves only with the former and confine our discussion to a consideration of a couple of a new poets who sing today with robust, even raucous, voices and remind us all that all’s not well with the world, although God’s in his heaven, as Robert Browning fondly placed Him there way back in the last century!

As Mr. E. M. Forster observed the other day when he was in Bombay, one of the significant tendencies of English literature between the two Wars, or during the “long week-end”, to employ the apt phrase Mr. Robert Lindsay, is its highly subjective and therefore, psychological element, and poetry is no exception to it. Mr. Laurence Housman, the playwright, is reported to have said something to the effect (as our Vice-chancellor, Sir Bomanji Wadia, informs us) that when he happens to be reading “modern” poetry his head “swims” or something, chiefly on account of its many obscurities and private allusions which are unintelligible to the average reader of poetry, but, as Mr. Forster reminded us, much of our contemporary poetry, English or Indo-English, is not stupid or worthless but intensely intellectual and, therefore, above the level of the common man! And Mr. Forster discussed this theme at some length, which was very good indeed. The truth of the matter seems to be that the pattern of our complex contemporary experience in relation to, our civilization is so different from what we were long accustomed to, that the vehicle which has to express it has also perforce undergone an appreciable strain, thus giving an incorrect impression to those who have not paused to analyse it.

Mr. Harry Milner’s few poems give us the enduring impression that he has felt something of the sense of utter tragedy underlying most of our erstwhile actions and decisions and he has been sensible to the reactions which the former have produced in man generally. His expression is in essence concentrated and his vision extremely bright like the rays of the tropical sun; as in these lines:

“I cracked my soul on a logical drum

And beat my heart to a march in tune;

But the world corrects itself without me

And I tear up the earth for the grave of the moon.”

He calls into question our march along the civilised way of life and even wonders whether we are not retrogressing to an era of primitive man long before the dawn of modern civilisation:

“I weep for my soul’s death.

No more can I

Strain at the breath of life,

Compel my heart

To praise the life men may have won

Ten thousand thousand years from this day’s sun.”

The same idea also animates this stanza from a poem called ‘On the Square’; the poet wonders whether, after all, man is not deceiving himself that he is now in a position to compete with God Himself because he has learnt to control lightning and rain, the sun and the ocean, the air and light:

“Is this the symptom of a new disease,

This craving for the rod?

A whacking now by fellow-men

Instead of one from God?”

Unfortunately, Mr. Milner appears to have seen only one side of life in today’s Bengal, and that too through coloured spectacles, when he says in the poem, ‘Bengal’–

“Green with the rush of the sap and the plash of the rain,

You are live, my Bengal!

And green are the snakes,

And green-scummed are your tanks;

And rank is the smell of the damp in your streets,

Of the palm leaves that flop from the drop of the rain,

Where the mosquitoes breed in the treacherous green

And the coolie girls sway–

Each a venomous queen–

As their flicking hands slay

The eyes’ ravenous dream,

The mind’s lecherous play

On the damp body’s gleam.”

Mr. John Gawsworth, four or five volumes of whose poems have just been issued in India, was also resident in this country for “one pacific, urban year” and, broadly speaking, the same strain runs in most of his work. There is a glaring contrast expressed between the futility of war and the treasured permanence of love, a theme that has inspired poets and artists from the beginning of Time. Take these lines from his poem by name ‘Parted Lovers’, for instance:

“O happy hearts

To beat as one

However severed,

However lone!

Love is to you

What love should be–

A shell containing

All the sea.”

Like Mr. Milner, Mr. Gawsworth too recurs to the theme of the inevitable but futile comparison of man with God, who is destined to remain forever above everyone and everything. He declares his faith in man’s state being “pitiful and puny” and indirectly sings of the superior beauties and bounties of Nature:

“I cannot conciliate the forest

Or make terms with the sea.

The mountains remain inviolate,

The storm rides my marches free,

I am but man.”

Through the toil and turmoil of our time, everyone of us has at one time or another longed sincerely for perfect quietude and has wished to be far from the madding crowd, far from the turbulence of man’s spirit:

“The Evening Star of Bethlehem

Granted some aged men release,

The morning moon on Kairouan

Gave one war-worn youth peace.”

Often the dull tedium of life in a military hospital was temporarily relieved by parties of troops entertainment. Of Mlle. Angeliki Akiki, a dancer in the British military hospital at Helmieh, he writes:

“Within her bright smile her Athens re-lives,

A vestal Eleusinian is born,

A naiad weaves through paths of Attic corn,

The one naiad that from old Greece survives

To dance, and so enliven broken lives,

To dance and comfort once-hale bodies, torn

In a holocaust that a World has worn,

Shattering hearthstones and bereaving wives.”

Here in this poet, too, we find a profound sense of disillusionment in violence and strife as a means of settling anything at all; in fact, this conviction runs through much of our recent verse:

“So it has come at last; our Victory.

This time that word we receive differently

Or has it been in vain, their sacrifice:

Drowned sailors’, encindered by the flame-thrown flare,

Pilots’, exploded in the air-tracers’ air.”

Mr. Gawsworth pays a glowing tribute to “the nightingale of India” whose lyrical strains and enchanting music have pervaded the world now for over four decades. It is simple and sincere and perhaps many of us will fancy it much:

“I have come far

To find the sigil of honour

Not on the padded breast of Order and Star

But in the deeps, under the sari that rests a garden on her,

In noble and valiant depths it truly lies;

Just as it lights–a lash!–

In one fast falcon-flash

Of her vital and vigilant kind eyes.”

One perceives an inherent unity and traditional consistency of theme and content in the body of English verse written during the last quarter of the 19th century and in the four decades of the present one. The anthology entitled “50 Modern Poems by 40 Famous Poets” brings together perhaps for the first time some of the best specimens of poetry written by such writers as Quiller-Couch, Robert Lynd, Havelock Ellis, Ernest Rhys, Douglas Hyde, first President of the Eire, Arthur Symons, Harold Monro, Gerald Gould, E. H. W. Meyerstein, Gerald Bullet and Ruth Pitter. It serves to show once again that, whatever the age in which men live, their intimate reactions to essentials are more or less similar, differing only in point of externals according to the fashions of the time.

On the whole, the future of present-day English poetry, as that of our Indo-English poetry, is extremely bright and promising, and this contribution to the literature of our time is sure to be reckoned as distinctive and important as that of the Victorians was held to be to that far-off epoch made luminous by the passage of time–the Great Victorian Age.

¹ Until Bengal by Harry Milner; Snow and Sand by John Gawsworth; Blow no Bugles by John Gawsworth; 50 Modern Poems by 40 famous Poets. (All published by Sushil Gupta, Calcutta, each priced at Rs. 3)

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