POEMS FOR YOUTH.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 74

POEMS FOR YOUTH.

Poems which have once stirred the emotions profoundly must go on singing in the memory and the blood (writes Gerald Gould in the Daily Chronicle). Or.e cannot forget them. What matter it if, to the maturer judgment, they seem not quite so ineffable as one had supposed? They have done their work, hey have served their turn, they have helped youth to be young, and given happiness to the happy. Many, many years ago, when moons were brighter and spring nights warmer than now, two young idiots used to wander about Bloomsbury, murmuring dreamily to themselves or each other, in a divine non-alcoholic intoxication, stanzas from Meredith’s “Love in the. Valley.” If the eyes of the other young idiot (I mean, of the respectable ana, indeed, distinguished member of society' who was at that time the other young idiot) should fall upon this reminiscence, I would wager that those haunting and ecstatic cadences will leap unbidden to his brain. Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o’er the gloom, spinß the brown ovejar Darker grows the valley, more and moro forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could bo will’d. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it fill’d. Not great poetry, say you, solemn critic? Not, at any rate, the greatest? Not to be compared with Homer or Shakespeare, or the grandest notes of Wordsworth and Shelley? I dare say vou are right. I am sure I cannot care whether you are right or wrong. I know only that it once seemed like the greatest to me, and that my critical faculty is con sequently, in that connection, suspended. It seemed feo breathe all hope, all omise. all reality. I used to feel that, if I had written that poem, I could die content. • • * It is right that we should grow up towards the greatest. We have to take some knocks from life before we can pven guess what the supreme tragic poets are writing about. A child who really appreciated Shakespeare would be a monstrosity. Not that youth objects to tragedy; but it likes to see the tragic fact pre-

sented with a blithe and singing note. It likes, too, to be devil-may-care and worldweary ; the most correct and home-keeping young things love to read (and even—but this is a darker secret—to write) poems in which it is indicated that hope is lost, and nothing remains but the extravagant consolation of the vine These tast©3, I suppose, account for the enormous vogue of “A Shropshire Lad’’ and “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” I don’t know how many copies I gave away of those two little books when I was twenty. Impecunious as I was the number must have run into dozens. Bat then, naturally, 1 received as well as gave All one’s twin-spirits—-and it is marvellous how many twin spirits one possesses at twenty—had birthdays, and one had a birthday oneself, and all the twin-spirits remembered it. How easy it is, even now, to understand the charm of those poems-for-the-young! How manly, how jolly, is the pessimism of the Shropshire Lad! What splendid gloom! What dazzling inspissation! Try I will; no harm in trying: Wonder ’tis how little mirth Keeps the bones of man from lying On the bed of earth. The courage of despair is pleasant; it is, perhaps, one degree pleasanter to despair even of courage: And much as Wine has play’d the Infidel, And robb'd me of my Robe of Honour—well, I often wonder what the Vintneis buy One half so precious as the Goods they sell. That, you see, is cynical as well as melodious. One is much impressed by cynicism—at twenty. * * * Mr Saintsbury has described, in one of his books of critical essays, the excitement with which he first met the lyrical measures of Swinburne. It is an excitement which renews itself in every generation. Swinburne does not “last” like some. You cannot be always returning to him. You begin to suspect him of narrowness of thought; you begin to see a trick in the repetitions. But let that be as it may—you have had the thrill once. The choruses in “Atalanta”: Before the beginning of years, There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears; Grief, with a glass that ran—and that other, even more hackneyed: When the bounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces . . . I cannot for very shame quote more of that; everybody knows it by heart. But, let us put it to the academic and the supercilious—is there not probably some good quality in verses which everybody knows by heart? Then there was Rossetti—a very great poet, I still think him, but I should not if I now met his sonnets for the first time, get quite the joy I once got from those musical and melancholy chimes; for instance: Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes, or, for another instance: Follow the desultory feet of death. Browning, too—what a poet for the young! With his : Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride; and his: I wilt hold your hand but as long as all may, Or so very little longer I I could extend the list: but these would still head it. And to the grand company of Young Idiots and Twin Souls I would say: “When you meet in your garrets, a 3 we used to meet, to read to one another the poems that delight you, and, probably, your own imitations of the same — don’t be discouraged if older and wiser people tell you that you are admiring what in after years you will not admire quite so much. The stuff is great, even though there is other stuff greater. And, anyway, if admiration may wane—all the more reason for admiring prodigiously now.