A DYING PATRIOT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 22, 26 January 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

A DYING PATRIOT.

TWENTY YEARS AGO. FI/ECKER AND THE WAR. (By C. R ALLEN). The poetry of James Elrov Flecker has won great recognition since the death of the poet at Davos in January, 1915. "Hassan," produced at His Majesty's Theatre almost ten years after Flecker's death, enjoyed the inestimable service of music by Delius, and was produced with every lavish circumstance by Basil Dean. "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" has been declaimed in every corner of the English-speaking world. Yet Flecker's legend has not the lustre of Rupert Brooke's. He was dying at Davos when the Great War broke out. It was Brooke who conveyed the news of Flecker's death to the biographer of the latter poet. Brooke enjoyed the fruits of a scholarship from Rugby at King's but Flecker took a post-graduate course in Oriental languages at Caius. "The Dying Patriot" was written when the poet's powers were failing. It does not represent him at his best, but the lines are intensely significant and intensely pathetic.

Day breaks on England down the Kentish h" ls . * * .. Singing in the silence of the meadow-foot-ing rills. Day of my dreams, O day! I saw them march from Dover, long ago, With n silver cross before them, singing low. Monks of Rome from their home where the blue seas break in foam Augustine with his feet of snow. Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town, —Beauty she was statue cold—there s blood upon her gown ; Noon of my dreams, oh noon! Proud and godly kings had built lier, long ago, With lier towers and tombs and statues all arow, With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there, And the streets where the great men go. Sleep not. my country; though night is here, afar Your children of the morning are clamorous for war; Fire in the"night, O dreams! Though she send you as she sent you, long ago, South to desert, east to ocean, west to snow, West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides 1 must go Where the fleet of stars is anchored and the young Star-captains glow. A Non-combatant's View. Tliese lines will revive in many, memories of that period when the world was overtaken by the stupendous disaster of the war. In that hour folk looked about for some word of comfort and guidance. Of course there were patriotic songs, good, bad and indifferent, and "Tipperary" supplied the Englishspeaking world with a species of anodyne. There were a few poets who had a message. At their head stood Rupert Brooke with a series of war sonnets. William Watson anathematised the es> Kaiser in the following sonnet:-

At last we know you, War-lord. You that

titing , , The gauntlet down, fling down the mask you

wore, . Publish your heart, and let its pent hate

pour, Toil that had God for ever on your tongue. We are old in war, and if in guile we are

young. Young also is the spirit that evermore Burns in our bosom, ev'n as heretofore. Nor are these thews unbraced, these nerves

unstrung. We do not with God's name make impious

play; We are not on such easy terms with heaven ; But in earth's hearing we can verily say, "Our hands are pure; for peace, for peace

we have striven"; And not by earth shall he be soon forgiven Who lit the fire accurst that flames to-day.

Apparently the poet'a indignation transcended the iambic pentameter. Brooke died before the disillusionment

could overtake him. He is separated, from such poets as Siegfreid Sassoon and Robert Graves by a kind of nimbus. Flecker was in a different case altogether. He wrote as a non-combatant, or as a combatant whose enemy was not armed with bomb or bayonet, but with that deadly disintegrating force against which he battled, first in a sanatorium in his own Malvern Hills, and afterwards at Davos, where Robert Louis Stevenson and James Addington Symonds carried on a similar strife. There are references in somo of his poems to the pines and the snow drifts on which he looked. Flecker saw his friends go off one by one to the various battlefields, and knew the bitterness of the non-combatant s lot. His repining was genuine. Post-war pessimism is familiar enough. Evelyn Waugh, in "Decline and Fall," has interpreted that pessimism in a frivolous manner. Flecker belonged to an age that knew nothing of that dreadful jocularity which overtook so many during the war. His pessimism was enlightened by what, for want of a better word, we must call culture. Uppingham School in his day was noted for brilliance in classical achievement, and a certain attitude towards life which it is difficult to define without giving offence. Teditim vitae was the prevailing note, and yet there was withal, a zest for life, expressed by Flecker in his poem on Pavlova. The Tedium of War. It may be questioned whether "The Dying Patriot" has the only authority which one is prepared to recognise in documents concerning tlie_ Great War, the authority of the participant. Air. Chesterton's , t prose rhapsody on the retreat from Mons, which was selected for reading on the occasion of a fourth of June at Eton, comes under the same ban. It is a magnificent piece of prose— magnificent, but not war. It is so easy to cast a glamour over war, ignoring what is its most devastating feature, its tedium. The man who took to soldiering from a sense of duty was beset by the spectre of boredom, perhaps not such a menacing spectre as fear itself, but an influence which rendered the sacrifice all the more notable. Some poets, such as Mr. T. S. Elliot, can work upon the theme of boredom in a poem, but Flecker was not that manner of poet. In his poetry he aimed consistently, if not invariably, at the creation of beauty. Even when horror is his theme he invests it with colour and majesty. In this respect he manifests his superiority to Mr. Masefield, who, though he rises to heights of lyrical fervour at one time, and imparts a quiet delight at others by suggestions of colour -and form, is capable of prodigies of flatness and ineptitude. The difference in the two men is that Flecker's richness and aptness is inherent, Masefield's is acquired. "Noblesse oblige" might be written of Flecker, the intellectual aristocrat, whereas Masefield, the nomine?! to the laureateship of the Labour Government, recognises no such obligation. For the moment, however, we are concerned with Flecker's outlook on that event which for some of us is something never apprehended, the World War which broke out twenty years ago. In view of the countless histories, the commentaries, the references both in biography and in fiction to that period which is as yesterday to the writer of this article, such a poem as "The Dying j Patriot" may serve a purpose. It may crystalise our vague and fluid thoughts into something of the nature of a gem or amulet. Such a token will be no burden to the young man who was born in 1914. It may serve him as a touchstone, or preserve him from the embarrassment that the presentation of the war tragedy entails. He may be occupied in an academic way with the wars of bygone centuries and bygone nations. He is as yet too near Great War to embark upon a campaign of disillusionment concerning it. There are no illusions about the Great War. Still "The Dying Patriot" will help him to understand how a poet was, if not wise before, the event, , idealistic about it in its early stages.