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The Spike or Victoria University College Review September 1927

In Defence of Form

In Defence of Form.

Looking through a periodical the other day, I was struck by the following lines:—

Standing here on the bridge
I look now up, now
Down, watching The crowd pass by, each
Concentrating on his own thoughts
(O purple darkness, vast intrigues of the cerebral convolutions)
Careless of his neighbour.
Near me
A man leans over the parapet
Spitting tobacco juice
Into the turgid water.
I watch the bubbles float, pale
On the pea-soup-like stream,
Drifting down, drifting down.....
Even so
I,
Spewed forth by a wanton deity,
Drift,
Helpless,
Upon the tide of life.

Now friends, fellow-bolshies, co-optimists with me in this era of universal liberty, I ask you, as man to man, where is the excuse for the vers-librist who produces such unmitigated twaddle as the above? Surely his threefold offence to the eye, the ear and the understanding, should be punishable with a goodly term of enforced silence, on each score; and as for the editor, the publisher and his minions, they should be indicted as accessories after the fact.

The tragedy of the case, dear friends, F-Bs and C-Os, lies in the fact that this excerpt is not a solitary example. No, non, pas du tout. The tide of vers-libre pours in upon us from every side. While much of this volume of so-called verse is meritorious and worthy of a better medium, the main current is, as our friend says of his stream, turgid, pea-soup-like. How can its murky shallows hold a true reflection of Beauty? How can its refuse-strewn surface present other than a distorted vision of Truth?

page 16

Vers-librists may not, it is true, have the slightest interest in either truth or beauty, but that is another matter.

In what, from sheer force of habit, I call my mind, there is a deep-rooted belief that if thoughts are worthy of utterance, they should either march in the majesty of prose, or sing themselves in verse that is at least rhythmed and measured, if not necessarily rhymed. These fits and starts, these chopped-off lines which constitute your vers-libre, are neither one thing nor the other. They are mongrels, hybrids, born of the slovenly thought-processes which characterise our generation.

It is so fatally easy too, this free-versifying. In other days the young gentleman who would become a poet, must needs compose flowery odes to his patron, and prime himself with classical and mythological references, to say nothing of acquiring a certain mastery of form, which is after all not the easiest thing in the world. To-day our budding songsters throw classicism and tradition to the winds, trample on every form or convention, damn creation, and apparently get away with it.

I think it is the inane and insane division of their lines which irritates me most—comparable only to the idiotic italics of Holy Writ. Why, in the name of all the Muses, should a man write: (returning to our priceless example) "I look now up, now" and take a fresh line and a capital letter for "Down"?

This is, as I remarked before, an age of freedom. I recognise that for too long our souls have been stifled by such cotton-wool creations as "They grew in beauty side by side," and "We are Seven"; but now the pendulum seems to be in danger of swinging too far in the other direction. In Biblical terms, that which is without form is void. If a song is worth singing, why not take the trouble to make music for the ear as well as for the mind? It may not be so easy, and too often shades of meaning and delicate sidelights of beauty may be lost in the exigencies of prosody; but what delights has vers-libre to offer, compared with the lilt and the ring and the swing of words that are rhymed and rhythmed?

Poetry is older than prose; it touches some chord in our ancestral memory, and stirs depths in us that no mere prose could ever reach. A man may face death happily to the echo of rhythmed words; he may endure life's bitterest blows who carries a song in his heart. One may even picture him facing the Income-tax Collector murmuring brightly "Mine not to falsify, nor be one penny shy, mine but to up and pay Over £600."

Now, when so much that is honoured and ancient is in the melting pot, when Art is a splodge on a canvas, and Music a jangle of jarring notes, let us, even at the risk of being thought old-fashioned, stand firm for Form—for the dignity of the sonnet, for the lilt of the lyric, and follow not unworthily in the tradition given to us by Milton, by Shakespeare, and by Keats.

—Formulus.