The Lower Slopes

How good is a good minor poet? Perhaps within a very generous estimate Mr Guinness would qualify. Plato excluded all poets from his Republic; and we must beware of the wish to exclude, on different grounds, all tame, weak ’prentice work. Mr Guinness can write with some felicity –

The night stands trembling on the tips of towers
In waiting for her paramour the day;
Before his kiss her deep blue body cowers
And at his touch dissolves in disarray.

It is called, appropriately enough, ‘Sunrise in Belgravia Square’, and represents the Muse’s response to Mr Guinness’s prolonged and rather queasy courtship.

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Mr Sansom’s work has deeper virtues and weaknesses. He never quite reaches the naked clinch with a mystery which could rejuvenate his language. Like our New Zealand poets of the first quarter of this century, he can be arch and wilful as a lady with a fan – or an idiot child. Like them he is too often an ornithologist. Joy comes oftener to him than to his reader. But his grip on language, often slackened, is never quite relinquished. His dramatic commentary on the life of Christ, ‘The Witnesses’, though marred by a breath of Y.M.C.A. blunt familiarity, has real stature –

Halt! Here’s the place. Set down the cross.
You three attend to it. And remember, Marcus,
The blows are struck, the nails are driven
For Roman law and Roman order,
Not for your private satisfaction . . .

So speaks the Centurion, at least with relevance; and ends his soliloquy – ‘Ah well, poor devil, he’s got decent eyes’. One is led to consider how far the peculiar limitations of English middle-class society have aided, and how far strangled, a strong and genuine talent.

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