VARIETY
in prose?"
If
the answer seems to
be "Yes," I consider the poem to
be
unjustified. I want to know ex–
actly what has been gained.
A good deal of what I have seen
since the war could not have been
done effectively in any medium.
A
good deal of contemporary verse
is masked exhibitionism. I mean
that the poet's first impulse was to
exhibit symptoms of his internal
discomfort and that his second im–
pulse was to mask these at once
with obscure statement and with a
prestige-laden form. In prose, he
would have been compelled to be
reasonably explicit and might have
rendered a clinical service to his
neighbours. Many poems seem to
stand out about half an inch from
the poet'·s skin like painfully ex–
truded ectoplasm.
If
there is to be poetry ... but
no,
I
have refused to prophesy.
A
girl-child of four with whom
I
am
on excellent terms and for the
normality of whose upbringing I
can vouch has produced within a
fortnight the following pieces of
imaginative utterance. First, a song
called "Jesus and his Wife" which
she sings to her dolls and of which
I have been unable to catch the
other words. Second, on seeing a
soldier with a bandaged foot in
the village high street, the obser–
vation: "All those poor soldiers
hurting each other. I expect what
they really want is to climb back
into their mothers' tummies."
Third, a remarkable dra·wing of
four suns which she named as the
f;::thcr sun, the baby sun. the mo–
ther sun and the go-to-school sun.
The child had begun school two
days before she did the drawing,
285
and she has a brother two months
old. The mother sun is flattened
and suggests a stretch of earth,
partly by its position. Thus in a
fortnight a child of four has taken
up the prophetic burden of hu–
manity from Blake, Freud and
Lawrence. I can add nothing to
this.
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
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Introductory essay by
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