Reading John Updike's last poems, I was set to thinking of all the other novelists whose poetry I've only found after, and often as not, liked better than their prose. D. H. Lawrence comes first to mind. I've never had much luck with Lawrence. The last novel I tried was The Plumed Serpent, and an ugly beast it was, too; racist, mean, and grossly proportioned, so that the head of the thing never quite lifted higher than its ass. In short stories, when he isn't too utterly mad, Lawrence is capable of remarkable things, real emotion for instance, of a kind not much encountered in the fiction of his period, and a surprising tenderness for women, when neither his mother or his wife, at least. His criticism, only recently read, is often amazingly astute, his intelligence being of the first order, though his own ideas, invariably being cockeyed, tend to taint even his best essays. (His letters betrayed so much of his lunatic philosophy, and spoke so often of his resentful poverty, that I sold the book.) But in his poems, often as not, Lawrence can be lovely. This, for example, from Parliament Hill in the Evening: "Eloquent limbs
In disarray,
Sleep-suave limbs of youth with long, smooth thighs
Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims
Of trousers fray
On the thin bare shins of a man who uneasy lies."
That is as good as anything in Hardy.
Emily Bronte, whose masterpiece I can no more read, it seems, than I can listen to the whole of an opera in English, is quite touchingly simple in her poems, as dear in her solitudes as Emily Dickenson, if by no means so individual or brilliant. This, from A Little While, A Little While:
"Yes, as I mused, the naked room,
The flickering firelight died away
And from the midst of cheerless gloom
I passed to bright, unclouded day --"
Or this, from Sleep Not Dream Not This Bright Day:
"I too depart I too decline
And make thy path no longer mine
'Tis thus that human minds will turn
All doomed alike to sin and mourn
Yet all with long gaze fixed afar
Adoring virtue's distant star."
Yesterday I came down before bed to find a story. I hadn't the head, I thought, for poetry just then and I hadn't the daylight left for so much as a chapter of a proper novel. I wanted just a story, a bedtime story if you will, but exciting enough to keep my eyelids sprung while I smoked my last cigarette in bed, preferably something with a murder in it, some thrill at any rate, and not more than a couple dozen pages in length, which comes to much the same thing as a smoke. I hit on Stevenson, a novelist I happen to love, as perfectly meeting my need. When I'd read James Pope Hennessy's biography, I'd made a note of stories to read, and never read Markheim, Stevenson's story of a murderer's confession, which his biographer suggested as "somehow more alarming" than The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I'd meant to hunt the story up in my set of Stevenson, collected, but I never had. So sleepily, I set about finding the right volume. Somehow though, instead of the volume of stories I wanted, I came away with a volume of "Poems, Ballads and Plays." By the time I discovered my error, I was already tucked up in bed, my socks off, my robe hung up, my last cigarette lit. I was annoyed, but not so much as to go back downstairs to fetch the right book. So instead I read the volume's introduction by Edmund Gosse, titled "Stevenson as a Poet," and then some poems after all.
Gosse made just the point that had preoccupied me earlier, that novelists of the best, seldom write much in the way of poetry at all, and when they do, to little if any affect, as compared to their fiction. But then, as my own reading proves, at least to me, there are always exceptions. Stevenson Gosse defends as an exception of the first order, and Gosse is right. A Child's Garden of Verses, first published in March 1885, has outlasted almost every other book of it's time, written for children or otherwise. Looking back on it from an even greater distance than did Gosse, it is all the more intriguing that it should have done, considering how absolutely remote from our own day are the conventions of Stevenson's nursery world; the nannies and servants, the world coming in only by books, the untroubled sleep of privileged childhood. Gosse gets it right though in suggesting that Stevenson, all but uniquely, never having lost contact with his boyish self, could and did write for children with no adult condescension, but rather as the most sympathetic, if sophisticated of playmates. (J. M. Barrie comes to mind as well here, and for the same reason, though considerably more encumbered by an uncomfortably weird psychology. Interesting, if probably irrelevent that both were Scots, and of roughly the same generation, though of very different backgrounds.)
I had never read, so far as I now remember, a single poem by Stevenson not intended for children. And now, in my hand, I had not only his famous "Verses," but two other slight books of poems, one English, one Scots, published together as Underwoods, and written for grown up readers. I've since read both, and a bit of the "Ballads." If the Scots poems dishearteningly begin with a "Table of common Scottish vowel sounds," I was at least somewhat better practiced in these for having so recently tried to read in my new volume from the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, Scottish Poems. Even with all the oddities of dialect, the strange words and weirder punctuation, I found in Stevenson's poems, Scots and English, many delightful things: gardens, and walks, and companionable memorials to friends, including two poems for Henry James! Stevenson's poetry, like his letters and travels, show the man at his happy best, more often than not, even when he was desperately ill. If none of these poems for adults have quite the charm of his poems for children, they nevertheless represent a most pleasant surprise for a fairly regular reader of Stevenson's fiction. I include here just the one, having rambled already too far for tonight, but again, I give the poem at full length as it's funniest in full:
THE COUNTERBLAST IRONICAL
By Robert Louis Stevenson
"It's strange that God should fash to frame
The yearth and lift sae hie,
An’ clean forget to explain the same
To a gentleman like me.
They gutsy, donnered ither folk,
Their weird they weel may dree
But why present a pig in a poke
To a gentleman like me?
They ither folk their parritch eat
An’ sup their sugared tea;
But the mind is no to be wyled wi’ meat
Wi’ a gentleman like me.
They ither folk, they court their joes
At gloamin’ on the lea;
But they’re made of a commoner clay, I suppose,
Than a gentleman like me.
They ither folk, for richt or wrang,
They suffer, bleed, or dee;
But a’ thir things are an emp’y sang
To a gentleman like me.
It’s a different thing that I demand,
Tho’ humble as can be—
A statement fair in my Maker’s hand
To a gentleman like me:
A clear account writ fair an’ broad,
An’ a plain apologie;
Or the deevil a ceevil word to God
From a gentleman like me."
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