Reciprocity
I do not think that skies and meadows are
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude,
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.
The Georgian poets, named after the reign of King George V (1910-1936), are associated today with formalism and conservatism, and rarely receive critical reappraisal. They were a large, diverse group and prominent for a brief period, thanks to annual anthologies edited by Edward Marsh, but the reputation of many of the poets was over-dependent on the marketing of a movement which appears in retrospect more cohesive than it was. Their influence failed to survive the first world war, and the poets who are still read today have established a clearer sense of their individuality. John Drinkwater (1882-1937) isn’t one of their number, and deserves fresh attention.
Drinkwater, a Londoner, often wrote about the sheltered places of rural England where he found congenial homes for his adult muse, but where, for contemporary readers, that muse sometimes too easily settles down. However, he is able to question himself, and his home-spun intelligence is on the watch in this week’s poem, from 1917. It was published originally in the collection Olton Pools, and the title poem of that collection is also worth looking up.
The 10-line poem questions its title in an opening statement that crosses the neat line-ending readers might expect from a series of Georgian rhymed couplets: “I do not think that skies and meadows are / Moral …” Keats’ steadfast “bright star” might be one of the Romantic tropes refused in the denial that the “fixture of a star / Comes from a quiet spirit” or “that trees / Have wisdom in their windless silences.” Those words “moral” and “wisdom” indicate the severity of the anti-Romantic challenge Drinkwater is making.
There’s an apophatic element in the writing, of course, because the poem returns to sky, fields, star and tree and the consolations they offer. But there’s a frank acknowledgment that the need is an emotional one: “Yet these are things invested in my mood / With constancy, and peace, and fortitude, / That in my troubled season I can cry / Upon the wide composure of the sky, / And envy fields, and wish that I might be / As little daunted as a star or tree.” These “things“ are “invested” with a significance particularly relevant to the context of the first world war. And the verb “invested” seems to sound a quiet alert that the speaker himself is invested in them. They are psychologically necessary, despite the rebuttal.
As hinted in Reciprocity, Drinkwater can be formally unconventional. In the poem Out of the Moon, although the lines can be stressed metrically, the irregularity of length works against any predictable rhythmical grain. It begins “Merely the moonlight / Piercing the boughs of my may-tree, / Falling upon my ferns; / Only the night / Touching my ferns with silver bloom / Of sea-flowers here in the sleeping city – / And suddenly the imagination burns”. The rhyming of “may-tree” and “city” is a bold one. While there’s a later lapse into the medievalism of troubadours singing in “hushed halls”, the poem’s claim to a burning of imagination isn’t without foundation. Drinkwater at his best remains a poet who acknowledges some of his own intensifications, and, arguably, earns them. Those “troubadours”, he claims, “knew the ways of the heart because they had seen / The moonlight washing the garden’s deeper green / To silver flowers, / Falling with tidings out of the moon, as now/ It falls on the ferns under my may-tree bough.” Even here, as in Reciprocity, the Romantic flight gently descends to earth.
