The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century | Page 4

negatively in his defiant Introduction to the
Works of Burns and in the famous paper on R. L. S., is the main
characteristic of his mind and temperament. He was by nature a
rebel--a rebel against the Anglican God and against English social
conventions. He loved all fighting rebels, and one of his most spirited
poems deals
affectionately with our Southern Confederate soldiers, in
the last days of their hopeless struggle. His most famous lyric is an
assertion of the indomitable human will in the presence of adverse
destiny. This trumpet blast has awakened sympathetic echoes from all
sorts and conditions of men, although that creedless Christian, James
Whitcomb Riley, regarded it with genial contempt, thinking that the
philosophy it represented was not only futile, but dangerous, in that it
ignored the deepest facts of human life. He once asked to have the
poem read aloud to him, as he had forgotten its exact words, and when
the reader finished impressively
I am the Master of my fate:
I am the Captain of my soul--
"The hell you are," said Riley with a laugh.
Henley is, of course, interesting not merely because of his paganism,
and robust worldliness; he had the poet's imagination and gift of
expression. He loved to take a familiar idea fixed in a familiar phrase,
and write a lovely musical variation on the theme. I do not think he
ever wrote anything more beautiful than his setting of the phrase "Over
the hills and far away," which appealed to his memory much as the
three words "Far-far-away" affected Tennyson. No one can read this

little masterpiece without that wonderful sense of melody lingering in
the mind after the voice of the singer is silent.
Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade
On desolate sea and lonely sand,

Out of the silence and the shade
What is the voice of strange
command
Calling you still, as friend calls friend
With love that
cannot brook delay,
To rise and follow the ways that wend
Over the
hills and far away?
Hark in the city, street on street
A roaring reach of death and life,

Of vortices that clash and fleet
And ruin in appointed strife,
Hark to
it calling, calling clear,
Calling until you cannot stay
From dearer
things than your own most dear
Over the hills and far away.
Out of the sound of ebb and flow,
Out of the sight of lamp and star,

It calls you where the good winds blow,
And the unchanging
meadows are:
From faded hopes and hopes agleam,
It calls you,
calls you night and day
Beyond the dark into the dream
Over the
hills and far away.
In temperament Henley was an Elizabethan. Ben Jonson might have
irritated him, but he would have got along very well with Kit Marlowe.
He was an Elizabethan in the spaciousness of his mind, in his robust
salt-water breeziness, in his hearty, spontaneous singing, and in his
deification of the human will. The English novelist, Miss Willcocks, a
child of the twentieth century, has remarked, "It is by their will that we
recognize the Elizabethans, by the will that drove them over the seas of
passion, as well as over the seas that ebb and flow with the salt tides....
For, from a sensitive correspondence with environment our race has
passed into another stage; it is marked now by a passionate desire for
the mastery of life--a desire,
spiritualized in the highest lives,
materialized in the lowest, so to mould environment that the lives to
come may be shaped to our will. It is this which accounts for the
curious likeness in our today with that of the Elizabethans."
As Henley was an Elizabethan, so his brilliant contemporary, Francis

Thompson, was a "metaphysical," a man of the seventeenth century.
Like Emerson, he is closer in both form and spirit to the mystical poets
that followed the age of Shakespeare than he is to any other group or
school. One has only to read Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan to
recognize the kinship. Like these three men of genius, Thompson was
not only profoundly spiritual--he was aflame with religious passion. He
was exalted in a mystical ecstasy, all a wonder and a wild desire. He
was an inspired poet, careless of method, careless of form, careless of
thought-sequences. The zeal for God's house had eaten him up. His
poetry is like the burning bush, revealing God in the fire. His strange
figures of speech, the molten metal of his language, the sincerity of his
faith, have given to his poems a persuasive influence which is
beginning to be felt far and wide, and which, I believe, will never die.
One critic complains that the young men of Oxford and Cambridge
have forsaken Tennyson, and now read only Francis Thompson. He
need not be alarmed; these young men will all come back to Tennyson,
for sooner or later, everybody comes back to Tennyson. It