A MODERN POET.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 144, 19 June 1926, Page 27

A MODERN POET.

JAMES ELROY FLECKER. (By R. FAIRBURN.) James Elroy Flecker is one of the half-dozen greatest poets of modern times. He died on January 3, 1915, at the age of 31, leaving to the world several books of poetry; a handful of prose sketches and essays, which have since been collected into a book, and "Hassan," his one published drama. He was an Englishman, and went to Oxford, and later to Cambridge. He wrote a vast amount of poetry in*his" younger days, most of which was, at the best, mediocre. In those days he followed the custom of the rising young poets by imitating Pater and Wilde to a great extent, and he did not reach his true level as a poet till he came into contact with the East. • In 1910, after a course of Oriental languages at Cambridge, he entered the Consular Service, and was sent to Constantinople, and from that time till the end of his life he lived almost uninterruptedly in various places in the East. Practically all his writings from this period onwards have the stamp of the Orient upon them. Hia Work. His drama "Hassan" breathes the very spirit of the East, and is one of the outstanding literary works of recent times, having been rated by many capable critics as the best since Shakespeare. The halfdozen songs which are embedded here and there in it represent some of bis best poetry, and are more in favour with the compilers of anthologies than a great many of his other poems. The "War Song of the Saracens" is well known. The first verse is as follows:— "We are they who come faster than fate: we are they who ride early or late. We storm at your ivory gate: pale kings of the sunset beware! Not on silk nor in garnet we lie. not In curtained solemnity die. Among women who chatter and cry, and children who mumble a prayer. But we sleep by the ropes of the camp, and we rise with a shout' and we tramp With the sun or tlie.moon for a lamp. ,and the 'spray of the wind in our hair." It , is rather puzzling that Flecker should have put such a wonderful poem in the mouth of the Saracens, for in the play they are nothing much more than a comic chorus. In "Hassan" is also to be found "Yasmin," that fragile and beautiful poem, which seems like some exotic Eastern flower:—- ---" But when the silver dove descends. I fino the little flower of friends Whose very name that sweetly ends I say when I have said Yasinin. . . •. . " Shower down thy love, 0- burning bright! For one night or the other night Will come the Gardener In white, and gathered flowers are dead. Yasmln." It has a hauntinsr loveliness of its own. and a queer note of pathos. The best known of the lyrics in "Hassan." however, is "The Golden Journey to Samarkand." This was written first, and the actual play, about which Flecker was never over-serious, put together afterwards more or less as a setting for it. The Eastern atmosphere pervades it throughout. "Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells. When shadows pass gigantic on the sand. And softly through the silence beat the bells. j Along the Golden Road to Samarkand." This poem is generally accepted to 1m his best work, at least among his longer ones. Of his shorter poems, "Tenebris Interlucentem" is probably the most likely to find a place in the hearts of posterity,:-----"A linnet who had lost her way Sang on a blackened bough in Hell. Till all the chosts remembered well. The trees, the wind, the golden day. At last they knew that they had died. When they heard niusie in that land. And someone there stole forth a hand To draw a brother to his side." Flecker and the Parnassian Tradition. Flecker is remarkable as being the. only poet in his generation who has not pursued the extreme modern ideal. Almost all'other poetry of recent times is on Wordsworthian lines, modified by such influences and possibly Thomas Hardy. Flecker is the only man of any importance who has gone back j further than tliis. The bulk of his work .shows strongly the influence • of the French Parnassian School. The proverbial fault of this school is, that, with it, beauty, which is avowedly its solitary 'ideal, ~ becomes too I cold .and- frigidly" statuesque:. This | is probably the result of the | objective method used by the Par- ' nassians, in which the poet is figured • as observer of the rest of the universe. The other, the subjective method, in which the poet considers himseif• in rela-' "tion to-the-world, forms--the basis of: the Wordswortliian tradition. Flecker

wrote a fair number of his poems while' under the influence of this style, "No Coward's Song" being typical: ! I am afraid to think about my death, ' When It shall be, and whether in great ! pain, I shall rise up and flght the air for breath Or calmly wait the bursting of tny brain. ' I am no coward who could seek in fear A folk-lore solace- or sweet Indian tales; "J 10 ** dead men,are deaf, and.cannot hear The singing of , a thousand nightingales. I know dead men .are blind, and cannot see The friend that shuts in horror their big eyes;.-',., And they are, witless—Oh, I'd rather be A living mouse than, dead as a man dies. But the greater .part, of his writings are iri complete opposition to this ideal. He seems to Have been afraid of the. accusation of posing, which the intensely personal and introspective style ,of Wordsworth ■ and df Housman and the other moderns ii iii danger of incurring, and to have adopted the Parnassian manner as an antidote to it. He returns to it occasionally, as in "Stillness," one of the last he wrote. This poem possesses in a greater degree perhaps than any other of his that artistic perfection for which Flecker always strove, and attained oftener than most of the moderns:— When the words rustle no more, And the last work's done, When the bolt lies deep in the door, And Fire, our Sun, Falls on the dark-laned meadows of tbe floor; When from the clock's last chime to the next chime, Silence beats his drum, And Space, with gaunt grey eyes, and her brother, Time, Wheeling and whispering come, She with the mould of form, and he with the loom of r*hyme; Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee I am emptied of all my.dreams; I only hear Earth turning, only see Ether's long bankless streams. And only know 1 should drown if you laid not your hand on mc. His Death*. For the last five years of his life Flecker suffered from consumption, and finally he died of it at Davos, in Switzerland. The last ■ poem he wrote, the "Burial in England," though not by any means his best work, shows us more of the man himself than any other. It was intended by him to be the supreme effort of his life, and it is 9ad to think that it lacks the greatness he desired to put into it, as is undoubtedly the case. It bears marks of hurry and lack of polish, which is not surprising, since he had to fight against time to finish it before he died. . . . Face square That old grim hazard, "Glory-o'r-the-Grave." . . . Yet is not death the great adventure still? . . . To have written those lines within three weeks of dying, knowing-that he should hardly see the ink dry with which he wrote .them, is at least something, and the "Burial in England" must, as somebody says, be respected as the "last noble gesture of a dying artist."