Читать книгу Poems, and The Spring of Joy - Mary Webb - Страница 4

Introduction

‘I have,’ said Thoreau,^[1] ‘a commonplace book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction that I had in mind, for the most beautiful and difficult facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success....’

For Mary Webb there seems to have been either no such vague distinction or no such difficulty. The mere statement of facts that she was interested in is poetical in effect. ‘The pollen grain of chicory—an outer and inner hexagon united by rays—is a rose-window in a shrine of lapis lazuli. It needs no light behind it, for it illumines itself.’ Few observers have taken the pains to describe an object so minute in terms so precise, yet the words are poetical in effect; they are charged with life and significance, and only a loving rapture in the thing itself could have found them for this purpose.

Sometimes the thing seen is very near home: ‘When a cherry blossom falls down the chequered steeps of the tree, a little mournful shadow goes with her.’ And sometimes it has come back from a long imaginative journey: ‘... The dwale—that lurid amphora, where the death’s-head moth, with its weird form and enchanted purples, drinks under the white light of the moon, and, if it is touched, cries out like a witch in a weak, strident voice.’ Or, ‘When, long ago, Odoric of Pordenone left the snowy Alps for the Himalayas, snow crystals of the same forms still fell around him.’

Poetical though such fragments are, they are expressed in what, since it is not verse, must be called prose. But Mary Webb being a poet is always a poet when her interest reaches a certain creative intensity, and the poetical in her writing is only a question of degree. It is an intensity that reveals itself not only in the presence of her few rarities, though these were equally her own, but of merely the common things in life which we share with the May-fly, the sparrow, the grass and the stars. It was her birthright.

‘As a child,’ she said, ‘I remember standing awe-stricken at the strange beauty of a well-known field in the magic of a June dawn.’ So had Traherne; so had William Blake. The world is any man’s, and apparently inexhaustible, but all that we know of it is what has been ‘transmuted into the substance of the mind.’ We make of it what we imagine. ‘O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ Other Hamlets, other dreams: ‘Whoever cares to look may see his neighbour’s barn standing in the celestial radiance of Revelations or the fantastic brilliance of elfdom.’ ‘Quite early on a summer morning, if you look down an ugly street in a busy town, you will scarcely know it.’

Not that such in-sight—and who is to say what are its limitations?—is the reward of indolence. ‘Evening after evening, in the summer, I have gone to see the white clover falling asleep in the meadow.’ Nor is it all pure joy. ‘Such beauty brings a longing (almost a torment to some minds) to be absorbed in nature, dissolved in it even to the losing of personality.’ So again: ‘The sun makes each leaf transparent, and the whole picture is ardent as the face of some angel of a flaming star. As the spirit strives to gather some of the beauty, it longs to be less finite, less bounded.’

With this heart to love and mind to labour, Mary Webb had in her service rarely delicate senses. All poets are for their own purposes good ‘observers’; though most of their ‘notes,’ maybe, take themselves. But by no means all poets are very exact and comprehensive observers. Mary Webb, whose world was ‘a place of almost unbearable wonder,’ had senses almost microscopic in their delicacy. She could—most rewardful of feats—seize the momentary. ‘It may be all illumined, like a sombre pine at the advent of wood-pigeons.’ That for sight. And for sound: ‘The peewits wheel and call continually, and from amid the ripple of their wings their cry sounds lost and lovely as some Naiad’s voice beneath running water.’ And this of the wind—with how far a journey: ‘It is like a whisper in the night, when you cannot tell whether a child or a man is speaking.... We never see the gates of its dark house swing open, nor watch it fall beyond the waters into its tomb beneath the yellow sunset.’ And for scent she tells of the resinous sweetness of agrimony on a dusty highway in July; the curious redolence of a rock in hot weather.

In these moods she had no need of ‘fine’ writing—the writing that is pitched above the voice. Her imagination went abreast with her feeling, and her words embodied both. The Spring of Joy wells over with a grave and sweet happiness, the happiness ‘of the minds of the simple-hearted, who are the Magi of the world.’ Trees, leaves, buds, flowers, fruits; country scenes and ways and work and pleasures; wind and waters, cloud, meadow and woodland; these are its never-failing joy.

It was written, ‘a little book of healing,’ for a definite audience—an audience whose bodiless presence cannot but be a little intrusive at times, simply because it breaks into the writer’s (and reader’s) solitude. There is little of the ‘indoors’ in it, and only such passing references as ‘the fœtid haunts of the money-grubbers’ to a way of human existence, which she examines more closely in her novels. Its ‘problems’ are those of peace and truth, of life and death, such as we can rarely face except when we are alone.

Its humour is shared with the long-tailed tit and the dewdrop globed in a buttercup rather than with anything less secret; for ‘laughter need not be lost to those that are cut off from their fellows.’ But that there were, as with Abel Woodus in Gone to Earth, ‘dark places’ in her soul is clear. ‘The men and women who most of all need peace are those who are smitten with some incurable disease.’ That we know was not a byword; but as she herself said of Abel: ‘It is the dark places of the soul that are the very core of art and its substance.’

The personal experience thus recorded is not only the essence of her fiction, it is also what her poems are ‘made of,’ and few writers indeed have left behind them so rich a posthumous gift. And though all that she wrote is suffused with poetry, the fine formal difference between her prose and her verse is usually vital, and is not the less essential for being difficult to specify. Phrases alien to the one are the very idiom of the other. Yet both are perfectly ‘natural’—she has learned the language. And even though an apparent spontaneity may be only apparent, this poetry is at its best when it seems most spontaneous. In any case the meaning conferred, as it were, by rhythm, cadence, sequence of sound and so on is that of the imagination itself; why so seldom acquired, who can say?

Memoried deep in Hybla, the wild bee

Sings in the purple-fruited damson tree ...

And here’s the aconite—a golden moon,

Shining where all her raying leaflets meet ...

It is the transmutation that Thoreau speaks of at a further remove:

There are the twisted hawthorn trees,

Thick-set with buds, as clear and pale

As golden water or green hail ...

Like The Spring of Joy the poems are chiefly concerned with the moods and scenes of solitude, and only rarely, but with how passionate a tenderness and generosity, with others—‘Treasures,’ ‘A Farewell,’ ‘Ah, do not be so sweet,’ ‘Why?’ ‘The Neighbours’ Children.’ For the most part they are simple, happy, tender, pathetic, and of the lovely earth, but there remain a few—the most original and the finest, as I think—that have for origin the life and experience that is of dreams, whether daydreams or of the night, but which is yet surely as ‘real’ as anything that can be tested by the usual senses. Such poems, for example, as ‘Viroconium,’ ‘Heaven’s Tower,’ ‘The Vagrant,’ ‘The Land Within,’ ‘The Ancient Gods,’ and ‘Colomen’—one of those romantic ‘beginnings’ that Mary Coleridge delighted in, and that is not the less the writer’s idiom because the ghosts of Christina Rossetti and Coleridge himself haunt its cadences.

But any writing about poetry, however well-intended it may be, cannot but resemble beating the air. It can do little but attempt to give reasons for a delight that needs none. And Mary Webb’s poems are more than usually her very self’s. I cannot remember the first occasion of our knowing one another, and alas, owing to illness, we seldom met during the year or so before her death. But her presence is as clear as ever it was. She brought her own quietness into a room—bright blue eyes, fair brown hair, small hands; bird-like, demure. She loved to listen to others talking quite as much as to talk herself, but her own talk had an extraordinary eagerness and vivacity. Then her nervousness was no more, and she shared her own intense interest and her own happiness.

Her gentle yet ardent company, no less than her books, revealed one clear assurance:

I love all beauteous things,

I seek and adore them;

God hath no better praise,

And man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them ...

walter de la mare

[1]	The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals. Edited by Odell Shepard.