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to enlist his co-operation not by the power of poetry, but by all kinds of
extraneous and irrelevant appeals. One does not have to be a King
Herod to detect something false in this paedolatry and to reject it. The
error is the Wordsworthian assumption for infancy of preterhuman
meaningfulness, and it is essentially an act of sentimentalization: for the
child is not simply loved and enjoyed for its own delightful sake, but is
converted into a Mighty Prophet!, Seer Blest! for grown-ups to tell
their fortunes by.
As a sonneteer Mr. Engle is hampered by his own fluency. His is
not Sidney's 'sweet sliding fit for a verse,' but an ambling trot:
She is a part of that world, though in play,
That lives when tin or golden trumpets speak:
Boy Blue found sleeping on the field of hay,
Or Roland plundered on the bloody peak.
'Though in play,' quotha! News if it were not! This is padding-what
the Spanish call
ripio-,
and it comes so naturally to Mr. Engle's hand
that he can compose entire octaves and sestets of it. Easy and pretty. The
sequence is easy and pretty, too: pretty talk on a pretty subject by a
pretty mind. But it aimed at more.
I am more nearly convinced by Mr. Sefm Jennett, whose
The
Cloth of Flesh
contains poems of a slow seriousness. His most appealing
characteristic, though it is also a dangerous one, is the honesty with which
he risks the commonplace. Frequently it is as though he were saying.
There is nothing novel here, nothing extraordinary, but it is important;
it has all been said before, and it cannot be said too often. So, in "The
Quick':
But that loud politician, ranting right,
look out for him, for he is totally blind
among the one-eyed and the cataracts,
and his way leads to hell:
not only now,
but, as for our fathers, after our time,
when the child we have conceived in love
shall grew to manhood in a world at war.
I find it both just and moving; yet no one could deny that the idea
is an ordinary one, and it is interesting to note that the poet dares
the challenge, as it were, by the ordinariness of his diction:
loud
politician; when the child we have
conceived in love
shall
grow to
manhood
in a
world at war.
The perils of this manner are plain
enough, and it is true that Mr. Jennett indulges rather more than
his share of
longueurs.
It is then that he tries for life by marrying
an adjective to each noun, by flirting with the colloquial dissonances
of Auden, and so forth. But when something is really happening-as in
