THE POETRY OF - - WILLIAM WATSON.

Otago Witness, Issue 2686, 6 September 1905, Page 85

THE POETRY OF - - - WILLIAM WATSON.

* (By Colona.) I

A two-volume edition of "the collected ' poems of William Watson has this year ' been published. Though the judgment of ' , all competent clitics of English poetry • has long since assigned the author a •place in the foremost rank of living writers, he is little knows in the colonies, j probably indeed not widely read at Home. j Neither the subjects nor the style of his i poems is such as to win popularity. By | temperament and surrounding influences I lie is of the classical school, and is no ! unworthy successor of the great classical , poets "of the mid- Victorian period — j Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. While ' ': not markedly original in thought or ; style, he is no" mere' echoer. His tone is ! j lofty and serious, often melancholy ; and i i his style condensed and vigorous, often i .' exquisitely finished, though he has not ', j Tennyson's magic felicity of phrase. ! For the 25 years since he published his ; first volume, his literary production has i j not been large. Tfiese two small volumes ! 1 contain all that he has thought worthy of ! ! republicalion. A volume of his collected ', I poems was published a few years ago, j and the present one contains most of the , poems included in the former, with some I earlier poems then omitted and later ' j works. But many of the previouslyj issued poems have been subjected to coa1 • siderable alteration, for Mr Watson is a ; j fastidious critic 6i his own composition. ' Probably lie is not a very ready writer. ■ } But ease and fluency have their dangers, i r and in these days of excessive book-rnak- ' ' ing we arte grateful to an author who , 1 gives us only of his best. With true self j judgment he indicates his limitations in •' , the following lines : — The mighty poet 9 from their flowing store 1 Dispense like casual alms the careless ore ; Through throngs of men their lonely way they go. Let fall their costly thoughts, nor seem to I know. j Mot mine the rich and! showering hand, that / strews 5?Ee facile laargessa of a stintless muse, A fitful presence, seldom tarrying long. ■ Capriciously she touches me to song — • Then leaves me to latnent her flight in vain, And wonder will she ever come again. i His "Apologia"' is a worthy vindication • of his aims and achievement : — TEus much I know ; what dues soe'er be mine, j Of fame or of oblivion, Time, the just, * ; Punctiliously assessing, shall award. i This Jiave 'I doubted never ; this is sure* 5 Some> have disparaged him , Because I bring nought new, • Save as each noon-tid-e or each spring is new, 1 Into an old and iterative world, i And can but proffer unto .-whoso will A cool and nowise turbid cup, from wells Our fathers digged; and have not thought it v shamo ' To tread in nobler footprints than my own, And travel by the light of purer eyes. } It was mine endeavour so to sing-, ! As if these lofty ones a mora&nt stooped 1 1 From their still spheres, and undisdainful graced i My note, with audience . / I too with constant heart, And with no light or careless ministry, [ Have served what seemed the Voice; and, ' unprofane, Have dedicated to melodious ends All of myself that least ignoble was. '■ For though* of faulty and of erring walk i ' I have not suffered aught in nic of frail To blur my song; I have not paid the world The evil and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness for a gift. - He is content to be the true descen- ; dant of our lofty and serious English . poets — Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth,— to bring moral earnestness and conscientious work like theirs to express the thought and emotion of his own day. I ' His earliest poem, "The Prince's i Quest,". is, in some- respects, curiously unprophetio of his maturer work. This beau- '■ tiful romantic poem, recalling Morris's lovely re-telling of old legends in "The ■ i Earthly Paradise," might have been the t prelude to many poetic romances drawn from Old World stories. But having , made this one essay in reviving niedisc- \ valism he turned his back on the purely [ fanciful. Perhaps, as time advanced, he . i felt something of unreality in re-fash iorx- , ' ing tales of old-time mystery in the \lv\\ . ! light of modern day. And the chill uf modern thought withered the freshness of ! youthful fancy, and turned him to austerer themes. He expresses this in a sonnet, "The Reign of the Muse" : — . O happy singers of that vernal day ! ■ Fled is the simple, bounded world ye saw, ' Those gods, that never dashed the soul with ' I awo, ' j Sunny imaginations, fled are they ; ' And on Olympus 1 , blind and ruthless Law ' Holds unadored his adamantine sway. 1 In a sonnet, "The Modern Sadness," lie contrasts Chaucer, "the unconquerably young," with himself: — ■ Thou art of the morning and the May— \ I of the autumn and the eventide. The sonnet is a very favourite form of • expression with Mr Watson. It is a form i often sought by those in whom the lyrical faculty is not strongly developed, who i find it an apt vehicle to express tersely a ' > vivid idea or emotion. The following is j an example of Ms best work in this , form : — • j ■— The World in Armour.— • I Under the shade of crimson wings abhorre3, ■ .' That never wholly leaves the sky serene, l While vengeance sleeps a sleep so flight ; be- j tw-een j Dominions that acclaim these overlord ' I Sadly the blast of thy tremendous word, 1 Whate'er its mystic purport may have been, , ' Echoes across the ages, Nazarene ; ' > Not to Taring peace, mine errand, but a sword, i > Fj)s in, .thi world, uprises and Jies do.vrs

In armour, and its Peace is "War in all Save the great death that weaves War's dread-

ful crown; War, tmennobled by heroic pain, War, where none triumph, none sublimely fall War, that sits smiling, with the eyes of Cain. His longer poems, after "The Prince'^ Quest," are elegies of which "WordsworLh's Grave," "The Tomb of Burns," and "Lacrymae Musarum" — on Tennyson — are perhaps Ihe most memorable. They are truly adequate to their themes, and are distinguished by some of the author's best examples of liis faculty of terse and illuminative characterisation. The poem on Burns — written in Burns' s favourite sanza — elw enesfidl : mnib powers and tha limitations that have made him a national poet : — No mystic torch through Time he borej' No virgin veil from Life he tore; His soul no bright insignia woro Of starry birth. He saw what all men see— no more— • In heaven and earth. But as when thunder crashes nigh, All darkness opes one flaming eye, And the world leaps against the sky,, j So fiery-clear Did the old truths that we pass by ] To him appear. In "Wordsworth's Grave," Burns is described as One 'neath northern skies, With southern heart, who tilled his father's field, Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise And touch quick Nature's hem, and go forth healed. To Wordsworth Nature "was not as legendary lands," but was truly home. The gifc of Wordsworth to his age wtn rest : — Rest! 'twas the gift he gave; and peace! the shade He spread for spirits fevered with the sun. i To him his bounties a.re come back here laid | In rest, in peace, his labcur nobly done. I The threnody on Tennyson strikes a note of more poignant emotion : — Lo, in this season pensive-hued and grave, While fades and falls the doomed reluctant leaf From -withered Earth's fantastic coronal, With wandering sighs of forest and of wave Mingles the murmur of a people's grief For him whose leaf shall fade not, neither fall. Ha hath fared forth beyond these suns and showers. For us the autumn glow, the autumn flame, And soon the winter silence shall he ours. Him the eternal spring of fadeless fame Crowns with no mortal flowers. One ol* the divisions in this collection is "Sonnets on Public Affairs." Many of these are taken from two precediug volumes, "'The Purple East" and "The i Year of Shame." They voice the poet's indignation at the apathy with which England witnessed the atrocities wrought by the Turk on Macedonia and Armenia. During the South African difficult : es, Watson, like many of England's finest tbinkers, incurred the reproach of bemg "Pro-Boer." He vindicates his patriotism in^the following : — Friend, call me what you will — no jot care I; I that shall stand for England till I die. England! The England that rejoiced to see Helaa unbound, Italy one and free; The England that had tears for Poland's doom, And in her heart for all the world made room ; The England from whose side I have not swerved ; * The immortal England whom I, too, have served, Accounting her all living lands ahoy« In Justice, and in Mercy, and in Love. Such poems as "England and Her Colonies" and the "Ode" on the Coronation of King EdwKid VII exhibit their author in a very different light from tha 4 ; of a "little Englarider." In the poems, "The Lost Eden," "The Hope of the World," "The Unknown God," tfhe author gives eloquent utterance to the agnosticism of our time, with its yearning regret for the "lost Eden" of religious certainty. The philosophic pantheism that for so many modern minds replaces the belief in a personal God has seldom found finer expression than in the second of the above-named poems : — When, overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; "When all I was to all men's sight Shares the -erasure of the day ; There do I cast my cumbering load, There do I gain a sense of God. / Not him thai with fantastic boasts A sombre people dreamed they knew— > The mere barbaric God of Hosts That, edged their sword and braced their thew : A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm Of neighbour Gods lass vast of arm. 0 streaming worlds, O crowded sky, 0 Life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of, I shall ne'er Know, though he dw-ells exceeding nigH. ' Eaise thou the stone and find me there ; Cleave thou the wood, and there am I." Yea in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Unmeet to bo profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold;' The God on whom I ever gaae', The God I never once behold. Above the cloud, bensath the clod, * The Unknown God, the Unknown God For the many who thus feel that the riddle of the universe can never be solved by man ; that Ids hopes and endeavours must_ be limited to this earth, nothing remains but for each to do his part to make human life noble, and to meat life and death with stoicism :— . Here, where I fail or conqiior, hers is my concern. Here, where perhaps alone 1 conquer or I fail. Here, o'er the dark Deep Mowrl^ I ask no perfumed gale; ; 1 ask the unpampering "broatli ; That fife me to endure Chance and victorious Death, Life, and my doom obscure, Who know not whence I am sped, nor to what I port I sail. 1 Influenza can be prevented trad crtscl fey WOLFE'S SCHNAPPS,