138
MARIUS BEWLEY
began in a comprehensive pity, heard through the bitterness, for
the world and life around
him.
It is impossible to agree with one of Mr. Justice's statements
from the Preface: Kees "speaks to us . . . in a particular tone of
voice which we have never heard before." Kees's talent was too
limited to make any large claim to uniqueness. One
has
heard this
tone of voice often, though rarely with such sincerity. It has the
representative quality of a generation that looked into the face of
its culture and saw a memento mori. Kees was a poet whose limited
talent acquires a certain luster and significance when viewed in the
perspective of his generous humanity. His poetry is the shocked
recoil of a decent, sensitive man from an indecent, insensitive time.
Although his reaction was shared by other writers of the '30's and
'40's, his work should retain a special value for the future because
in him the reaction was human rather than intellectual.
Kees, like other poets of his period, was a good deal concerned
with time. Time has always been a preoccupation of poets. For the
seventeenth century it was erosive in a way that emphasized the
hard materiality of created things:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
It is the gates of the five senses here that are iron: time, if insistent,
is
curiously elusive and insubstantial in the winged chariot that
Marvell allows
him.
For the Victorians, time was historic and pro–
cessional, and already growing nostalgic in a way that the twentieth
century would capitalize on:
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But
0
for the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still.
For the poets of Kees's decades, time had lost its stately processional
quality and had turned into an unscrupulous landlord threatening
to cancel the lease or foreclose the mortgage. As Kees put it:
This is the end of the swollen year
When even the sound of the rain repeats:
The lease is up, the time is near.
