STORY-TELLING IN VERSE.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1539, 7 September 1912, Page 9

STORY-TELLING IN VERSE.

The poet is a fellow -who simply will not be kept down. Hβ refuses to accept the critic's pronouncement that the verseform is no longer suitable for this or that special purpose. He refuses to listen to tno business man in literature who tells him that poetry, in nearly every form, cannot sell. Lack of commercial success ias not discouraged • hiin, for instance, irom writing stage-plays in verse. The poetic drama nourishes to-day in book form. That the dramatic poet starves at his occupation doos not seem to enter into tho problem. Audacity is his motto. Far from being discouraged, he looks about him for new worlds to conquer. In England, the poets have begun of late to.write novels and short stories in verse. It was apparently. a hazardous speculation. It was entering into competition in an overcrowded field and under a severe handicap. But narrative in.' verse, if all the signs do not fail, is. to occupy the poets for some time to come; It is now more than an.experiment, becauee in the present instance audacity has succeeded. The young men who are writing metrical fiction have actually made it pay. 'The pioneer of'the new movement, is probably Alfred With afl extraordinary . gift for fluent, musical verse, this young man of two-and-thirty has produced half a score volumes of verse in as many years. He has written lyrics, balladry, , and epic poetry. In his "Flower of Old Japan," published in 1903, ho first attempted the tale form. Only recently. ho has returned to the narrative from in his "Tales of the Mermaid Tavern," a collection of short stories with the great figures of tho Elizabethan theatre for his characters. A emooth-rolling- line, an easy way with his rhymes,, a familiar, homespun vocabulary, and plenty of plot aud "action" give to these stories ot wild adventure and wild talk about the midnight tavern tables in Shakespeare's London, the elements of popular appeal; The ballad from appears frequently in Sir. Noyes'a narTative, but only as an incident. _ The story as a wh6lo moves forward with a terse swiftness that is not of the ballad. There 13 also the ; cynical wisdom of a newer age, in lines like the following: He was far-famous for his grave-digging. In depth, in speed, in neatness, jhe'u no match! They've put ft fine slab to his memory In 'Peterborough Cathedral—Robert Scajslet, Sexton for half a century, it says, In Peterborough . Cathedral, where he built The last sad habitation for two queens. 'And- many hundreds, of the common sort. And now , himself, who for so many built Domus Oeternales, others have buried. Obiit anno aetatis, ninety-eight, July the second, fifteen ninety-four. "We should do well, sir, with a slab like that, Shouldn't we?" And the sexton leered at ■ Lodge. "Not many boasts a finer slab than .that, There's many a king done worse. Ah, well, you see. He'd a fino record. Living to ninety. eight, Hβ buried generations of the poor, k countless host, and thought no more of it • • Than digging potatoes. He'd a lofty mind That found-no satisfaction in smnll deeds. But from his burying of two queens he drew 1 A. lively pleasure. Could he have buried . a third, It would, indeed, have crowned his old white haira. But he was famous, and he thought, per- ' chance, A third were mere vain-glory. So he died. I, helped him with the-second."

With Alfred Noyes the manner is modern, but the subject is romantic. Iα John Masefield's "The Widow in Byo Street" we have a short novel in verse, but quite ia the naturalistic tradition. It is a story of thb slums with many details that Emile Zola would not have omitted. There are lyric interludes, to bo sure, but is jiol; the proie novel itgeil in. the habit of calling the ' lj.ti.Q-

art and tho musical art to its help? The important thing is that a poot hero has gone down to the raw of contemporary life and told his story with no attempt to mince his words. Mr. Masefleld has been assailed for his savage realism of incident and phrase. Insistence has been laid on the narrow line that separates fluent verse from doggerel. Even the author's motives have been questioned. But the point that concerns us is that a poet of to-dny, iu trying to come to grips with life, has abandoned the lyrical form for the narrative form.

Alfred Noyes and John Masefleld do not stand alone. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's "Tho Hare," in a rce.?nt number of the London "Ration," is a poem of some four 'hundred lines, that can be descriusti as nothing else than a short story in verse Mr. ; Gibson's manner typifies the school of new poets:

She'd always lived in caravans— Her father's, gay as any man's, Grass-green, picked out with red and yellow, And glittering bravo with burnished brass That sparkled in tho sun like flame, And window curtains, white as snow, ». . But they had died, ten years ago,. Her parents both, when fever came. And they were buried, side by side, Somewhere beneath tho wayside grass. ~ . In times of sickness, they kept wide Of towns and busybodies, so No parson's or policeman's tricks Should bother them when in a fix. .. „ Her father never could abide

A black coat or a blue, poor man. . . a And so, Long Dick, a kindly fellow, When you could keep him from the can. ■And Meg, his easy-going, wife, Had taken her into their van,' And kept her since her parents died. « ~ And she had lived a happy life, ; Until Fat Pete's young wife was token. , . . But, ever since, he'd pestered her. ... And sho dared scarcely breathe or stir, Lest she should see his eyes a leer. . . . And .many a night she'd lain and shaken, And very nearly died of fearThough safe enough within the van, With Mother Meg and her good man— This narrative poetry of the year 1912 peaTs the stamp of its own age, though in form it may continue the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, . "Don Juan," the "Tales of a Wayside Inn," and "The Earthly Paradise."—New York "Nation."