Flowers and Thorns

It is perhaps not strange that a Field Marshal should compile an anthology. Yet it seems so, as if the eagle or the butcher-bird should happen to build a jay’s nest. Military men may have enthusiasms outside their profession, even in an age of specialists. It is significant, however, that the best of Lord Wavell’s selection comes under the sub-heading of ‘Good Fighting’, and that his taste, outside ballad poetry, swerves toward the sentimental lyric of a nationalist variety.

The selection (it can hardly be called a full collection) of Roy Campbell’s translations is not adequate. It includes many polished but uninspired renderings from the Portuguese and from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, whereas the poet’s truly magnificent version of the poems of St John of the Cross has been clipped severely, and Lorca too has suffered. Enough remains to show Campbell’s rhetorical strength and something of the genius of the originals.

The off-beat talent of Wyndham Lewis seems always to fall short of a balanced maturity in painting, prose or verse. One suspects that he is too much an arguer, a propagandist, to achieve the contemplative serenity a major work requires. Fancy intrudes on imagination; argument silences the oracle. If there is such a thing as poetry of the ego, Wyndham Lewis has written it –

The man I am to live and to let live.
The man I am to forget and to forgive.
The man I am to turn upon my heel
If neighbours crude hostility reveal.
The man I am to stand a world of pain.
The man I am to turn my back on gain.
The man I am somewhat to overdo
The man’s part – to be simple, and brave and true.

So runs a relatively lucid passage of ‘One-Way Song’, written in 1933. It is good fun, but is it poetry? Mr T.S. Eliot in his Introduction warns against that question, but I will ask it. Is it even well-made verse? The heavy abstraction of the more difficult sections exhibits often obscurity without depth. Yet the ferocious individualism of the writer compels one’s admiration.

1960 (223)