Art. 9.-THE POETRY OF LAURENCE BINYON.

1. The Four Years-War Poems collected and newly augmented. By Laurence Binyon. Elkin Mathews, 1919. 2. Lyric Poems. By Laurence Binyon. Mathews, 1894. 3. Porphyrion and other Poems. By Laurence Binyon. Grant Richards, 1898.

. Odes. By Laurence Binyon. The Unicorn Press, 1901. . The Death of Adam and other Poems. By Laurence Binyon. Methuen, 1904.

■. London Visions. By Laurence Binyon. Collected and augumented. Elkin Mathews, 1908.

· England and other Poems.

Elkin Mathews, 1909.

And other works by the same.

By Laurence Binyon.

THE poetical output of Laurence Binyon is considerable. t comprises some twelve volumes, containing, if reprints re included, over 1000 pages. Apart from its mere bulk, t would be impossible to give an adequate account of it n a single article, owing to the width of the poet's range nd the high quality of the greater part of the verse. What is proposed here is something much more modest -to run over the more important of his poems and xtract from them what appears to be the principal message of the poet, but not from any narrow didactic r moral standpoint, for which we English have such an verwhelming weakness. Our quest on the present ccasion has a broader aim. To put it in a nutshell, it onsists in attempting to discover and define the poet's ttitude towards life. For every poet is in love with fe, as indeed we all are; but the poet's experience iffers from that of ordinary mortals, in being at once more intensely particular and also more intensely uniersal. He is so intensely himself that he is also part nd parcel of ourselves as well. This is indeed the upreme paradox of spirit. The greater its oneness, the nore it is shared by others. Shakespeare is pre-eminently hakespeare because he is half the world besides.

From one point of view Laurence Binyon strikes one s a pilgrim. He has tried many genres, and in most he as been successful. But he has tried them, not as the verage woman tries various ready-made costumes in

the hope she may find something to suit her. He is too fine an artist to ignore the fact that it is not enough to adopt a style; one must also adapt it. Or to take another metaphor-the plagiarist is the John Gilpin of style. He is absolutely at the mercy of his 'mount.' Whereas, for the true poet, whatever style he may adopt, epic, lyrical or what not, style is a high-mettled thorough-bred,' which in spite of its previous training he must break in for himself. It is true there is a fine academic tradition about much that Binyon has written. Until his recent war poems, in more than one of which he has exhibited an interesting metrical freedom, he has shown himself a conservative alike in metrical form and vocabulary. But, while he has been a more or less scrupulous observer of the rules of the 'haute école,' there has been nothing actually conventional about his handling of his Pegasus.

To come back to the pilgrim idea. One receives throughout his poems, the impression of an explorer rather than an interpreter of the law, of the seeker after truth rather than of one with a ready-made message to be delivered ad nauseam, like Wordsworth in his later years. He has rather impressions, intimations, intuitions to record than any cut-and-dried dogma that will save the Universe. There is about his poetry a sense of the open door, of the soul that seeks inspiration and illumination rather than one which radiates infallibility. Perhaps in this attitude of proving all things and holding fast to that which appears to be true in his eyes, he is a real child of his times, born in. that iron interim and interregnum, when the theories of a thousand years have gone down or are going down wholesale in a world-wide catastrophe of war and revolution and their still more alarming consequences. This fluidity of instinct finds its parallel in the rise during the same period of the theory of the élan vital of Bergson, which lays stress on instinct rather than reason, on a dynamic Becoming rather than on an eternal and immutable status quo. In the present article, therefore, we have largely dealt with the poems in the chronological order in which they have appeared, as it would seem to furnish the most satisfactory method for exploring the growth of the poet's thought especially on the metaphysical side.

6

In the course of his pilgrimage Binyon has fremented many shrines. In London Visions' one feels he influence of Matthew Arnold, and to a less extent of Wordsworth. In others Milton and Keats have to a ertain extent inspired him. One predominant characristic is observable throughout his poems. It is his clination for musing and reflexion. Occasionally this oughtfulness has the effect of making him work out o fully an idea that has caught his fancy. A little mpression in such cases seems desirable. Again, this oughtfulness seems at times to become too self-conious. It leads to a restraint and reticence in his verse hich contrasts strangely with the Sturm und Drang of e louder-voiced poets of the day. It shows itself very arkedly in the absence of climax in the concluding erses of the majority of his poems. Like the Greeks, inyon prefers to end on the soft pedal. White light ther than white heat appears to be his ideal. There is aequableness about his verse that recalls the equableess of Sophocles.

Apart from certain verses privately printed, the first lume of Binyon's poems appeared in 1894. The ems it contains are illustrative of that dignity of ought and word which is the hall-mark of all his ritings. There is about them, in fact, a remarkle maturity, which is often lacking in the early work young English poets. The fondness for musing entioned above is already in evidence, yet it is neither erile nor trivial. Noteworthy, too, is a certain pictorial Et, exercised sometimes with broad fresco-like effects, other times with a pre-raphaelite faithfulness-an rly revelation, in fact, of the future fine critic of estern and Eastern painting, for Binyon as a writer the fine arts is but little less celebrated than Binyon a poet.

As these early poems are less known than they ought be, we propose to make quotations from three of em. Moreover, these quotations will exemplify certain es of his poetry to which we shall refer later. The st, from the fine Requiem for A. S. P.,' reveals the Hective powers of the poet.

'Too much hadst thou of pain, and fret, and care;
Yet surely thou wast meant for joy: to whom
Life that had given thee days so hard to bear,
Could still yield moments of so rare a bloom.
"That longing in me which can never sleep,
To live my own life, to be bravely free,
What is that longing but the passion deep,
The sweet endeavour, to be true to thee?
'Austerely fair, the vast cathedral, filled
With February sunshine, marbles old,
Pillar on pillar, arch on arch revealed:
The light, the stillness, on my grief took hold;
'Hushed within those gray walls, that could not change
When kneeling sorrow heavenly comfort hears;
Appeased by their eternal strength, that, strange
Itself to pain, permitted human tears.'

Truly a fine epitome of that final farewell in which grie and consolation are so strangely intermingled.

·

The second quotation is from Recollections of Cor

wall,' and is in a pictorial vein.

'Ah, that wild slope beyond Penzance,
Where, deep in heather, drowsed we lie,

Till on us steals the fairy mist

And makes a blank of sea and sky;

Blots out the distant Lizard coast,

And steals across the silent bay;
Saint Michael's Mount becomes a cloud,
And dimly wanes the lingering day.'

The third quotation is from 'Niobe,' the forerunne in that epic and narrative field that the poet cultivate later with such success in The Death of Adam,' an above all in 'The Death of Tristram' and 'Penthesiles The poet tells how, in answer to the prayers of Niob the Olympians came down to sleep-enchanted Thebe and buried her children.

'But on the tenth day the high Gods took pity,
And in the fall of evening from their seats
In heaven, came down toward the silent city,
The still, forsaken ways, the unechoing streets;
And through the twilight heavenly faces shone.
But no man marvelled; all yet slumbered on.

...

'And while stars gathered in the lonely blue,
They buried them, with haste and nothing said;
Feeling, perchance, some shade of human years,
And what in heaven is nearest unto tears.'

'

6

It is, however, as the poet of London that Binyon first de his mark. Others have sung of London in various pects, notably Wordsworth in his splendid sonnet; ile Westminster Abbey has inspired more than one ole poem. But, with the exception of Henley, Buchanan, vidson, and the more popular ballad-mongers, no one made the various sights of London more peculiarly own than Laurence Binyon. He had seized and tured the very genius loci of the place-so impalpable A yet so real. London Visions,' together with the raise of Life,' originally appeared as three separate nbers in Mr Elkin Mathews' Shilling Garland,' in goodly company of Henry Newbolt's Admirals All,' phen Phillips' 'Christ in Hades,' and Robert Bridges' urcell Commemoration Ode.' Most of these 'Visions,' ected in one volume, were republished in 1908. The poems have sometimes the vigour and realism of trang etching, at other times they recall the vaporous ospheric effects of Whistler. Red Night,' which is ine description of a nocturnal London fire, possesses qualities of both. It is also reminiscent in parts of iller's 'Song of the Bell.' Many of the pieces deal h work-a-day themes, as roadmenders, Salvation ses, the Hyde Park reformer, the toy-seller, the ragker and all the flotsam and jetsam of Whitechapel h Road at night. Binyon has in fact done for the abler folk of London what François Coppée did for submerged tenth of Paris. But the most significant m from our particular standpoint is that entitled the reshold,' which opens with a splendid description of glories of the full-flooding Thames at sunset. The t recalls the youthful Thames of the upper reaches.

'Far from these paven shores, these haughty towers, Where wave and beam glorying together run,

As though they would disown those cradling bowers, And gushed immediate from the molten sun.'

soon passing into a reflective vein, the poet, as he