Poet’s Garden

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 2, 4 January 1937, Page 11

Poet’s Garden

TREES DEDICATED TO MEMORY JOHN MASEFIELD'S CONTRIBUTION. John Masefield, Britain’s Poet Laureate, took the time while he was on the Pacific Coast to plant two little trees in what is known in Hollywood as Poet’s Garden, and to say a few words about poetry, reading some of his own songs, says a writer in the Christian Science Monitor.

Poet’s Garden is itself as interesting a manifestation of the desire of an artist to make something as original as a poem. The garden’s sponsor is Mrs Ruth Le-Pnide, who has dedicated her private home to tho idea of poetry, brotherhood and peace. Her desire is that it act as a monument to the aspiration towards life and truth which every poe' visions as Paradise and the Kingdom of Happiness. Tho trees in the garden are named for poets. A graceful willow is dedicated to Shakespeare, and a St John’s bread tree to Robert Browning. Walt Whitman has a lilac for himself; and, for the first time in nino years, it bloomed in 1935, just after a volume of “Leaves of Grass,” bearing his own autograph, was added to the garden’s library. It also bloomed this year, after Masefield’s visit.

Lombardy poplars, flowering peach, white roses, red roses, wistaria, magnolia, and varieties of palm and fig tree arc named for Sappho, Shelley, Keats, Omar, Milton, Byron and others.

Mr Masefield’s contributions to the collection are a pomegranate, which he dedicated to his own laureateship, and a Californian oak, which ho dedicated to “his master,” Chaucer. “What is poetry ” I asked Mr. Masefield.

For answer ho referred me to p. lecture delivered in England where he states poetry is the spiritual light in which the true poet himself dwells. Poems worthy of the name are in some measure manifestations, types, or

shadows containing often some of the elements of the actual substance of this real world of song, joy and ecstasy. “Who are the great poets —fZi singers of all time?”

The four supremo poets, according to Mr. Masefield, are Homer, Aeschylus, Dante and Shakespeare; but Yeats he considers as the most important single influence on modern thought.

“All alike had access to- an illumination of the mind by which they became poets, and this comes within the being, just as sunlight comes to -he sea. This illumination exists etern£uy, ana all may in some measure know its meaning, either by effort of desire, or grace of God. Those who deny it, however, can never have really felt its power. It is so intense that compared with it no other sensations seem to exist or to be real. It is so bright that all else seems shadows. It is so penetrating that in it the littlest thing—the grain of sand, the flower of a weed, the plumes of a moth’s wing—all these are evidences of the depth and height and beauty of life.”