The Poetry of Robert Bridges — New Ways In English Literature

Chapter VI

THE POETRY OF ROBERT BRIDGES

IF a person steeped in English poetry from Chaucer to Swinburne, were suddenly to find the poetry of Robert Bridges with the dated poems ruled out, it is highly probable that he would arrive at the conclusion that the poet was dead. In other words, the supposed reader would come upon a new classic, a poet swimming in a Hellespont of Grecian mythology, and occasionally landing for a rest on the shore of simple human emotion.

But Robert Bridges is not dead. At seventy-two he can write a fine sonnet on the passing of a great soldier, a fact that puts a higher value on his authentic unofficial verse. And the poetry of Robert Bridges is far from being dead. Its suggestion as to the period of its authorship comes from a thoroughly infused affinity with the best of English poetry of a past generation, before the fuss and passion of modernity broke in upon its repose and aloofness. It is Keats-like in its sensitiveness to

natural beauty: it is the torrid zone away from the Shelleyan volcano of social revolution : it is porcelain to the unpolished clay of Byron : it is intellectual innocence to the labyrinthine speculation of Browning; yet it shares with all these master-singers the subtle thing that we feel to be mastery. Its author is one of their august company, riot by virtue of any unique gift of melody or vision, but because he has had the strength to absorb the spirit and manner of the great singers of the past, and yet to add something distinctive to the history of English literature. He is far removed from Prometheus, of whom he sings in his drama, " The Firegiver."

He may be mad and yet say true—may be

The heat of prophecy like a strong wine

Shameth his reason with exultant speech.

Robert Bridges never goes mad: yet in his cultured sanity he touches truth, and grasps beautifully at the flying robes of Beauty. At times he finds exultant speech—not in singing about exultation, but in the unconscious disclosure of joy. Prophecy does not disturb him : his highest inspiration is human affection. It was, indeed. the coming of Love that set him free from the objective domination of the

Hellenic incubus, while it left him in subjective possession of something of the Parnassian spirit. He celebrates the change of centre in the sonnet that opens the sequence entitled " The Growth of Love."

They that in play can do the thing they would,

Having an instinct throned in reason's place...

These are the best: yet there be workmen-good

Who lose in earnestness control of face,

Or reckon means, and rapt in effort base

Reach to their end by steps well understood.

Me whom thou sawest of late strive with the pains,

Of one who spends his strength to rule his nerve,

Behold me, now that 1 have cast my chains,

Master of the art which for thy sake I serve.

Thereafter, love and song are one in his life, and each keeps the other at the level of dignity and purity, and perhaps the best expression of the duality in unity is in this song:

Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake ! The darkness silvers away, the mom doth break,

It leaps in the sky : unrisen lustres slake

The o'ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake !

She too that loveth awaketh and hopes for thee,

Her eyes already have sped the shades that flee,

Already they watch the path thy feet shall take:

Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!

Two verses more add nothing to the poem except April blossoms and sunrise, but the whole piece is shaking with lyrical happiness ; unsophisticated, devoid of thought, and scrupulously clean. After it, we are not surprised to find Robert Burns' tomb littered with another sermon on the sinfulness of sin, and Eros, the idol of the human race," " the tyrant of the human heart," thus summed up:

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristened smile

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will, and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

For a while it looks as if the critic of Eros were a gentle Satan reproving sin, so fully does

he enjoy—not sensuous innocence, for that means innocence as the act, with sensuousness as the character, but an innocent sensuousness, a sport among the lilies and roses of the senses, but with a pure heart, preserved from the great illusion by the presence of Time's menace that is haste and misery to the earthy, but a solemn heightener and economiser of joy to the spiritual. So it is that, when the poet sits with his love in presence of nature's immensities, there comes the salutary comparison that drives love in some to abandonment, but in our poet to seeking immortality by transmutation into the very nature of the love that binds the universe.

We talk of moons and cooling suns,

Of geologic time and tide,

The eternal sluggards that abide

While our fair love so swiftly runs ;

Of nature that both half consent

That man should guess her dreary scheme

Lest he should live too well content

In his fair house of mirth and dream ;

Whose labour irks his ageing heart,

His life that wearies of desire,

Being so fugitive a part

Of what so slowly must expire.

But Bridges does not end in the pessimism of this scientific contrast. He feels beneath and through the mask of " energy and substance " the divine necessity of Personality : he apprehends Being not Law as the basis of the universe and human life: the Great Sharer gives and takes in the dearest intimacies, and part of the Sharer is the community of humanity. Such is the burden of his poem, " The South Wind," in which this passage occurs :

Who art thou, in wind and darkness and soft rain

Thyself that robest, that bendest in sighing pines

To whisper thy truth ?.........

....For me thou seekest ever, me wandering a day

In the eternal alternations, me

Free for a stolen moment of chance

To dream a beautiful dream

In the everlasting dance

Of speechless worlds, the unsearchable scheme.

To me thou findest the way,

Me and whomsoe'er

I have found my dream to share

Still with thy charm encircling ; even to night

To me and my love in darkness and soft rain

Under the sighing pines thou comest again,

And staying our speech with mystery of delight.

Of the kiss that I give a wonder thou makest,

And the kiss that I take thou takest.

The purpose of this short note on the present English Laureate is to point out in a very general way, as above, the leading influences in his poetry. The entirely unnecessary and unbeautiful inversion in the second line of the-foregoing extract is a temptation to dilate on Dr. Bridges' little weakness for pottering among questions of poetical mechanism. What purpose is served in spelling could coud ; why he writes the line,

All day i'the blazing sun, when the syllabic value of " i'the " and " in the " are the same : why he writes " wer'ours," are beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals. But their proportion to his whole work is negligible, as negligible as his occasional figurative lapses, as when he makes the sun plunge to his bed, and primroses shoot clustered cream. One really only mentions such peccadilloes of a great poet because the finding of them pays a compliment to one's cuteness of ear or eye : it is human to announce the discovery of a spot on the sun ! In much the same category stands

the piece of appalling doggerell that the future laureate felt it his duty to write for the Jubilee of 1897, and which the Latin at its head and foot serves only to enclose in well-merited tombstones.

Of more importance than these trifles is the Laureate's exercise work on old and new ways in prosody. They indicate the enthusiasm of the craft-artist, and here and there in some of his lyrics the use of stresses and pauses suggest new possibilities in English poetry. An excellent example of internal rhyming is a small piece called " April, 1885," of which I quote a stanza, italicising the rhymes :

Wanton with long delay the gay spring leapingcometh;

The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:

eve of May : All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth :

The cuckoo sends afloat afloat his note on the air all day,

This method, however, while unusual in English poetry, was one of numerous similar rhyme-schemes that the Gaelic bards perfected in Ireland before the fifth century A. D.

Probably the essence of Robert Bridges'

works, its inspiration, message and justification, are summed up in the little poem that runs :

I love all beauteous things

I seek and adore them ;

God hath no better praise.

And man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make,

And joy in the making ;

Altho' to-morrow it seem

Like the empty words of a dream

Remembered on waking. That, it may be, is the beginning and end of Creation, Cosmic or human—beyond reason, beyond desire, a simple urge to make a simple effort of consciousness that holds all complexity within it, but is free from its domination. It is that spirit that will, I think, hold Robert Bridges' poetry up against the oblivious tendency that, with a couple of exceptions, is traditional in the office that he holds, but that, fortunately for English Literature, does not hold him.