Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 104Poetry
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The Celtic Renaissance.—Some of the best recent English verse has been written by poets of Irish birth or sympathies. Because of the distinctive quality of both the poetry and prose of these Celtic writers, the term "Celtic Renaissance" has been applied to their work, which glows with spiritual emotion and discloses a world of dreams, fairies, and romantic aspiration. As Richard Wagner received from the Scandinavian folk-lore the inspiration for his great music, as Tennyson found the incentive for The Idylls of the Kings in Malory's Morte d'Arthur, so the modern Celtic poets turned back to the primitive legends of their country for tales of Cuchulain who fought the sea, Caolte who besieged the castle of the gods, Oisin, who wandered three hundred years in the land of the immortals, and Deirdre who stands in the same relation to Celtic literature as Helen to Greek and Brunnhilde to German literature. Some of the fascination that the past and its fairy kingdom exerted over these poets may be found in this stanza from Russell's The Gates of Dreamland:—
"Oh, the gates of the mountain have opened once again And the sound of song and dancing falls upon the ears of men, And the Land of Youth lies gleaming, flushed with rainbow light and mirth. And the old enchantment lingers in the honey-heart of earth."[1]
William Butler Yeats.—One of the most talented and active workers in this Celtic Renaissance is William Butler Yeats, born in 1865 in Dublin, Ireland. He came from an artistic family, his father, brother, and sisters being either artists or identified with the arts and crafts movement. Yeats himself studied art in Dublin, but poetry was more attractive to him than painting.
He was greatly influenced by spending his youthful days with his grandparents in County Sligo, where he heard the old Irish legends told by the peasants, who still believed them. He translated these stories from Irish into English and wrote poems and essays relating to them. After reaching the age of thirty-four, he became engaged in writing dramas and in assisting to establish the Irish National Theater in Dublin. In thus reviving Ireland's heroic history, Yeats has served his country and his art.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.]
The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) is his best narrative poem. Oisin, one of the ancient Celtic heroes, returns, after three hundred years of adventure, to find Ireland Christianized. St. Patrick hears him relate that he had been carried by his immortal wife, Niamh, to the land of the Ever-Young,—
"Where broken faith has never been known, And the blushes of first love never have flown,"[2]
that he had battled for a hundred years with an undying foe, and that his strength had not waned during his stay on those immortal shores, although he had felt the effect of age when his foot again touched his native land. The days of "gods and fighting" men are brought back in this romantic poem. The battles, however, are not such gory conflicts as Scott and Kipling can paint. Yeats's contemplative genius presents bloodless battles, symbolic of life's continued fight, and accentuates the eternal hope and peace in the land of immortal youth.
Among his shorter narrative poems, which show some of the power of The Wanderings of Oisin, are The Death of Cuchulain, The Old Age of Queen Maeve, and Baile and Aillinn. Baille and Aillinn are the Irish Romeo and Juliet, each of whom hears from the baleful Aengus the false report that the other is dead. Each lover unhesitatingly seeks death in order to meet the other at once beyond these mortal shores. Yeats has also told simple stories in simple verse, as may be seen in The Ballad of Father Gilligan or The Fiddler of Dooney.
The most striking characteristic of Yeats's work is the pensive yearning for a spiritual love, for an unchecked joy, and an unchanging peace beyond what mortal life can give. These qualities are strikingly illustrated by such poems as Into the Twilight, The Everlasting Voices, The Hosting of the Sidhe (Fairies), The Stolen Child. The very spirit of Celtic poetry is seen in these lines from The Lake Isle of Innisfree:—
"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings."[3]
Yeats's verse has been called "dream-drenched poems." The term is admirably descriptive of his romantic, lyrical verse.
George W. Russell.—Among the most prominent of these Celtic imaginative writers is George W. Russell (1867- ), "the Irish Emerson," popularly known as "A.E." He is a poet, a painter, a mystic, and a dramatist. With Lady Gregory and Yeats, he has been one of the most active workers for the Irish National Theater. He is an efficient member of those coöperative societies which are trying to improve Ireland's industrial and agricultural conditions.
Russell's poetry is highly spiritual. Sometimes it is so mystical that like Prospero's messenger, Ariel, it vanishes into thin air. His shadowy pictures of nature and his lyrical beauty and tenderness are evident in two little volumes of his verse, Homeward Songs by the Way (1894) and The Divine Vision (1904). This Stanza from Beauty, in The Divine Vision, shows his spiritual longing for quiet, peace, and beauty, in which to worship his Creator:—
"Oh, twilight, fill in pearl dew, each healing drop may bring Some image of the song the Quiet seems to sing.
My spirit would have beauty to offer at the shrine, And turn dull earth to gold and water into wine, And burn in fiery dreams each thought till thence refined It may have power to mirror the mighty Master's mind."[4]
Fiona Macleod.—All the work of William Sharp that he published under the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod" belongs to this Celtic Renaissance. Born in 1856 at Paisley, Scotland, he settled in London in 1878, and became widely known as William Sharp, the critic. When he turned to his boyhood's home, the West Highlands of Scotland, for inspiration, he wrote, under the pen-name of Fiona Macleod, poetic prose stories and many poems about these Scotch Celts. He kept the secret of his identity so well that not until his death in 1905 was it known that Fiona Macleod, the mystic, was William Sharp, the critic.
Mountain Lovers (1895), a romantic novel of primitive people who live with nature in her loneliness, mystery, and terror, and who possess an instinctive, speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods, is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels. He excels in the short story. Some of his finest work in this field is in The Sin Eater (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint, strongly-marked highland characters with their weird traditions.
From the Hills of Dream (1901) and The Hour of Beauty (1907) are two small volumes of short poems full of the witchery of dreams, of death, of youth, and of lonely scenes. These poems come from a land far off from our common world. Delicacy of fancy, a freedom from any touch of impurity, a beauty as of "dew-sweet moon-flowers glimmering white through the mirk of a dust laden with sea-mist," are the qualities of Fiona Macleod's best verse.
John Masefield.—Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the themes for their verse. Masefield was born in 1875 in Shropshire. He was a seafarer in his youth, and later, a traveler by land and sea. These varied experiences contributed color and vividness to his narrative verse.
[Illustration: JOHN MASEFIELD.]
He has written several long narrative poems on unromantic subjects. Dauber (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the most poetic. This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who, wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at first hand. Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist's ambition, his rough handling by the uncouth sailors, and his perilous experiences while rounding Cape Horn. Dauber exhibits the poet's power of vividly picturing human figures and landscapes. This poem, like most of Masefield's long narrative poems, is a story of human failure,—a dull prosaic failure, such as prose fiction presents in its pessimistic moods.
A strong and cheerful note is struck in some of Masefield's short lyrics, notably in Laugh and be Merry, Roadways, The Seekers, and Being Her Friend. In Laugh and be Merry, the song is almost triumphant:—
"Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man. * * * * * Laugh and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord."[5]
Masefield's fancy does not busy itself with dreams and impossible visions. He paints life in its grayness and sordidness and dull mediocrity. Sometimes his verse is merely plain rimed prose, but again it becomes vigorous, picturesque, and vivid in description, as in the following lines from Dauber:—
"…then the snow Whirled all about, dense, multitudinous cold, Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek Which whiffled out men's tears, deafened, took hold, Flattening the flying drift against the cheek."[6]
Wilfred W. Gibson.—Gibson, who was born in Hexham in 1878, sings of the struggling oppressed work-a-day people:—
"Crouched in the dripping dark With steaming shoulders stark The man who hews the coal to feed the fires."[7]
His poem, The Machine, awakens sympathy for the printer of Christmas story books and reveals Gibson as the twentieth-century Thomas Hood of The Song of the Shirt. One of the most richly human of his poems is The Crane, the story of the seamstress mother and her lame boy. His realistic volume of verse bearing the significant title, Daily Bread (1910), contains a number of narrative poems, which endeavor to set to music the "one measure" to which all life moves,—the earning of daily bread.
Gibson owes much of his popularity to his spirit of democracy and to the story form of his verse. Like Masefield, he sacrifices beauty to dull realism. Gibson manifests less range, less dramatic feeling, than Masefield, but avoids Masefield's uncouthness and repellent dramatic episodes.
These two poets illustrate a tendency to introduce a new realistic poetry. Wordsworth wrote of Michael and the Westmoreland peasantry, but Masefield and Gibson have taken as subjects of verse the toilers of factory, foundry, and forecastle. Closeness to life and simplicity of narration characterize these authors. They approximate the subject matter and technique of realistic fiction.
Alfred Noyes.—Alfred Noyes was born in 1880 in Wolverhampton Staffordshire. He wrote verse while an Oxford undergraduate and he has since become one of the leading poets of the twentieth century. He has traveled in England and in America, reading his poems and lecturing on literary subjects.
[Illustration: ALFRED NOYES.]
The Flower of Old Japan (1903) is a fairy tale of children who dream of the pictures on blue china plates and Japanese fans. The poem is symbolic. The children are ourselves; and Japan is but the "kingdom of those dreams which …are the sole reality worth living and dying for."
The poet says of this kingdom:—
"Deep in every heart it lies With its untranscended skies; For what heaven should bend above Hearts that own the heaven of love?"[8]
The Forest of Wild Thyme (1905) affords another
"Hour to hunt the fairy gleam That flutters through this childish dream."[9]
There is also a deeper meaning to be read into this poem. The mystery of life, small as well as great, is found simply told in these lines:—
"What does it take to make a rose, Mother-mine? The God that died to make it knows It takes the world's eternal wars, It takes the moon and all the stars, It takes the might of heaven and hell And the everlasting Love as well, Little child."[10]
Noyes has published several volumes of lyrical verse. Some of it possesses the lightness of these elfish tales. The Barrel Organ, The Song of Re-Birth, and Forty Singing Seamen are among his finest lyrics. They display much rhythmic beauty and variety. He strikes a deeply sorrowful and passionate note in The Haunted Palace and De Profundis. A line like this in The Haunted Palace—
"…I saw the tears Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,"[11]
indicates the strong emotional metaphor that occasionally deepens the passion of his verse.
England's sea power, immortalized in song from Beowulf to Swinburne, often inspires Noyes. His finest long poem is Drake: An English Epic (1908), which relates the adventures of this Elizabethan sea-captain and his victory over the Armada. The spirit of a daring romantic age of discovery is shown in these lines that tell how Drake and his men—
"…went out To danger as to a sweetheart far away, Who even now was drawing the western clouds Like a cymar of silk and snow-white furs Close to her, till her body's beauty seemed Clad in a mist of kisses."[12]
Another volume of poems, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913), brings us into the company of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Jonson, Raleigh, and others of the great Elizabethan group that made the Mermaid Tavern their chosen resort. Greene's farewell to Shakespeare,—
"You took my clay and made it live,"[13]
shows that Noyes has caught something of the spirit that animated Elizabethan England.
Noyes is one of the most spontaneous and fluent writers of modern English poetry. Whether he is mystical, dramatic, playful, or marching along the course of a long narrative poem, he handles his verse with ease and facility. His language, his rhythm, and his thought are most happily blended in his graceful singing lyrics. The work of Noyes is inspired by the desire to show that all things and all souls are—
"One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres, We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years."[14]