[Holly Martins]

I've always had a soft spot for the Georgian Poets. When modern art was exploding around them they kept on going, no doubt hoping one day people like Eliot, Pound, Picasso and Schoenberg would be exposed as charlatans. Nowadays it's ok to say you don't like Pound or Picasso but the poor old Georgians remain terminally uncool. Here's a poem by John Drinkwater (1882-1937):


BIRTHRIGHT

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed
Because a summer evening passed;
And little Ariadne cried
That summer’s fancy fell at last
To dust; and young Verona died
When beauty’s hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know
Because the clouds of hawthorn keep
So short a state, and kisses go
To tombs unfathomably deep.
While Ramases and Romeo
And little Ariadne sleep.

[John Whitworth]

I have a little penguin (170pp) of Georgian poets edited by James Reeves. I have a companion volume of Imagist poetry, pretty well all tripe in my opinon. Leaving aside the big guys, Graves, De la Mare, Davies, there is much pleasure to be gained from the likes of Drinkwater (shame about the name eh? Perhaps that's why he's not in the book) and, my favourite, James Elroy Flecker. 'Who reads Flecker Now?' said Pound. I do, Ezra old fruit. And I don't read YOU.

THE TRANSLATOR AND THE CHILDREN

While I translated Baudelaire,
Children were playing out in the air.
Turning to watch, I saw the light
That made their clothes and faces bright.
I heard the tune they meant to sing
As they kept dancing in a ring;
But I could not forget my book,
And thought of men whose faces shook
When babies passed them with a look.

They are as terrible as death,
Those children in the road beneath.
Their witless chatter is more dread
Than voices in a madman's head:
Their dance more awful and inspired,
Because their feet are never tired,
Than silent revel with soft sound
Of pipes, on consecrated ground,
When all the ghosts go round and round.

He did translate Baudelaire, by the way. Jolly well, too.

[Peter Coghill]

My I love that poem! I think there was a bit of Baudelaire channeling going on.

[Richard Epstein]

Well, the Drinkwater displays the talent of the Georgians--and the reasons it didn't come to much. They couldn't resist the lure of "pretty" words, trying to do their work with the automatic responses generated by stock vocabulary. It was lines like "When beauty's hour was overcast" [it doesn't mean anything at all; really it doesn't] Yeats had to learn to get past. Isn't it bad enough that kisses go to tombs without their having to be "unfathomably deep"?

The sonorous cadences are nice; they had good ears, which can't always be said of their successors, but it just wasn't enough.


RHE

[Brian Watson]

Lord Rameses, Ariadne, Verona, Romeo...
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?

Are summer evenings in Egypt all that pleasant?

Birthright is pleasant to read, but lacks reality and quickly fades from memory. Sorry, I'm inclined to agree with Richard.

The Flecker is much more to my liking.

[John Whitworth]

Oh come now, it really doesn't matter what summer evenings in Egypt were like. Besides it's very long ago and the weather may have been QUITE different. Drinkwater's poem is about names, among other things and, certainly, slight. But slight is not bad.

And isn't Yeats rather a straw man to set up against the Georgians? The earlier Yeats, that we all know and like, is very Geogian indeed. 'Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams', 'For Fergus rules the brazen cars', 'I know thatI shall meet my fate Somewhere among the skies above', 'Was there another Troy for her to burn?', 'Nine bean rows'. Not a lot of modernism there, as far as I can see. It has always struck me that Yeats was essentially a musical poet and the message is neither here nor there. The curious religion he got from his daft spiritualist books has never been much to my liking. 'What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem?' I've no idea. 'Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness'. You don't say?

Irish Georgians abound. My favourite (not counting Yeats, is Buck Mulligan, Senator Oliver St John Gogarty. His poem 'Golden Stockings' has been sung by generations of Irish girls and boys.

Golden stockings you had on
In the meadow where you ran
And your little knees together
Bobbed like pippins in the weather.

and so on. Can't you hear T.P. McKenna reading that?

[Holly Martins]

Richard, I'm not cracking this up as a great poem but it's very charming - the Georgians were good at the sweet and charming - and it makes a nice change from some of the ugly, dreary, shocking stuff written at the time. Translation: 'When beauty's hour was overcast' means the end of the beautiful summer's day, or the end of a mythical Golden Age.

[Allen Tice]

Holly seems right on to me, Richard. What I personally don't yet grok is "clouds of hawthorn." I want it to respond to the "overcast" line. I have to assume it refers to flowers.

[Richard Epstein]

Mr Whitworth,

Yes, Yeats did start out behind the Georgian 8 ball; that's why his growth was so necessary and is so impressive (and why, alas, he needed to credit Pound's assistance in jump starting the process).

Ms Martin and Mr Tice,

Yes, I could come up with an explanation of each of the shadowy lines; I meant only to point out how vague and abstract the poem is, how heavily it relies on the automatic responses generated by poesy-fied words and how little that response is earned.

The ephemeral clouds of hawthorn (it is almost the only concrete image in the poem) are the tree's spring blossoms, a cloud which does not last and which, inevitably, ends up on my sidewalk or lawn, insisting on being raked and swept.

RHE

[Clive Watkins]

A few personal snippets, none important....

I’m broadly with John and Holly on this one – though, unlike John, I do read (some) Pound. But then I read only some Georgians, of course. (I, too, have James Reeves’s anthology.)

We have a hawthorn tree in our garden. There are hawthorns all along the lane (Park Lane) which begins only two hundred yards from our door and runs away through the fields. There were two hawthorns in the garden I knew as a boy. They have nasty thorns but pretty blossom and berries; their branches have a tendency to grow together in a dense mass.

John Drinkwater is buried in the churchyard of the tiny north-Oxfordshire church in which my paternal grandparents, Job and Phoebe, were married in 1908. Job was an agricultural worker and particularly adept at making quickset hedges, in which hawthorn was prized for creating an impenetrable barrier.

Clive