May 31, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
.15 
Ralph Hodgson's Verse 
By J. G. Squire 
THKRE are Englishmen alive' of all ages, from Mr. 
Bridges and Mr. Hardy downwards, who have 
written fine poetry. The torch has never gone out. 
But there has been a great revival in poetry during 
the last ten years : and all tlio.talk about whether the war 
would turn youpg men to poetry is wide of the mark, because 
almost all the young men of genius or' talent were writing 
j)oetry years before the war began. Some of the group repre- 
sented in Georgian Poetry (iqi3)^two of the most -gifted, 
J^upert Brooke and ]. S. Flecher, have recently, to the great 
loss of English literature, died on the Uireshold of their })rime 
— have begun to. come into their own; but others are still 
unrecognised by many who would not willingly overlook good 
contemporary work if they knew where to find it. One of 
these is Mr. Ralph Hodgson, a volume (Poems, 3s. (k\. nej) 
by whom has just been published by Messrs. Macmillan. It 
is a book of only seventy pages, and contains e\-erything Mr. 
Hodgson has written for several years. That Mr. Hodgson 
is still not better known is partly due to the infrequency of his 
publications, and partly to Jiis horror of self-advertisement 
and a peculiar shyness (he must forgive this intrusion into 
his private life) which has resulted in many men knowing 
him for years without realising that his principal occupations 
were not attending boxing-matches and acting as judge at 
bull-dog' sliows. The present collection, Jiowever, will greatly 
extend his reputation. 
* * * * .- 
Mr. Hodgson is a naturalist. He writes ot wild life vrith 
the famiUarity of Jeflries or Mr. W. H. Hudson. This is a 
very unusual thing in a jwet : and indeed, there is no reason 
why poets should know mare about rare birds and elusive 
beasts than anybody else. The lark arid the nightingale 
are one thing : but Jones's Warbler is another. Mr. Hodgson, 
however, does not write like a mere naturalist, putting names, 
colours or shapes down merely because he knows or has noticed 
them. But whenever he is most deeply moved it is to wild 
creatures that he turns, both for his major symbols and for his 
minor imagery. His animate world is one and indivisible : 
man is but the King of He.ists, and a questionable sort of 
monarch at that. 
The meanest slujj with midnight goive 
Ifas left a silver trace. 
And whatever his subject, Jie is sure to be arrested by tlie 
physical beauty of living things and the spear-like straightness 
of their impulses to sing, to love, and to fight. In Eve he ' 
turns the temptation of man into an idyll, light and delicate, 
but not insincere. The evil one accosts the jnaiden as she 
stands knee deep in 'tlie grass picking berries. But even the 
tempter has his points to one M'ifh an eye for grace: 
Tumbling in twenty rings 
Into the grass. 
and it is characteristic of this poet that when lie comes to 
the tragedy of the expulsion he can express it l>est through 
the sorrow of the titmouse and the wren. The only poems 
in which he is angry and indignant are those in which lie 
belabours " the j»iinj) of fashion," who scours the world for 
plumes, and similar bku-kguardly or ignorant exterminators. 
* * * 4t 
Mr. ITodgson's two finest poems are The Bull and The 
Song of Honour. They are complementary, and they exhibit, 
taken together, his emotional reaction (he does not theorise 
at all) to the spectacle of heaven and earth. The birds and 
beasts liere are as vividly seen and felt as ever, but they arc 
before everything manifestations of the creative energies of 
the universe. In The Song of 'Honour he climbs a hill " as 
light fell short." The stars come out. There is a silence- 
and then it is broken. : 
* There, sharp and sudden, there I heard- 
Ah ! some wild lovesick singing hird 
1 1 'oke singing in /lie trees ? 
I'he nightingale and halMe wren 
Were in the linglish greemvood then, 
A nd you heard one of these ? 
The bablile wren and niglif-ngale 
Sang in the Abyssinian vale 
'■ That season ot the year ! 
Vet, true enoiigli, I lie.inl tliem jilain. 
1 heard them tnith again, again. 
As Klinrp and sweet and clear 
As If the Abyssinian tree 
Had tlirust a bough across the sea, 
Had thrust a bough across to me 
With music lor my ear. 
1 heard them l)oth, and, oh ! 1 lieard 
The song of e^■ery singing bird 
That sings beneath the sky. 
-And then comes in stanza after stanza, necessarily breathless 
and disjointed, the catalogue of the adoring " Sons' of Light : " 
courage, generosity, and beauty where\'er found : 
The music of a lion strong . 
That shakes a hill a whole nighf luniT, 
A hill as loud as he, 
■Jhe (witter of a rnouse among 
Melodious greenery, 
'Jhe ruby's and the rainlx)w's f^ong, 
The nightingale's — all three. 
The song of life that wells and flows. 
From every leopard, lark and rose 
And everything that gleams or goea 
J^ack-lustre in the sea. 
The attempt to write about " the whole harmonious 'hvmn of 
bemg," has often been made, and with a much greater 
equipment of metaphysical conception and polysyllabic phrase : 
but Mr. Hodgson's simply-worded p;ean convinces. When 
he has heard his own " Amen " to it and stands dizzy on the 
hill, staring and staring at the stars, one is left with none of ^ 
that uneasy sense of affectation that one so frequentU- gets 
when men attempt to chant the Cosmos. 
* « * * 
The Bull gives the other side of the medal.. Here, too, life 
strains and writhes, but its beauty is terrible, and its effort 
ends in failure and death. In one ])oem the mystery of 
goodness and joy is sung, in the other the mystery of pain 
and evil. It is a hot moist land of marsh and forest where 
there are no men. The old bull, until now leader of a thou- 
sand bulls and cows, has been dethroned and cast out and lie? 
in the undergrowth awaiting death, whilst gaudy parrots, 
and tree-cats, and monkeys, flit about above him and, in the 
slush below, flies and beetles afid spiders treep ab(jut, and a 
' "**"' ' ^ - -1 -1 - -I . ... watch on all 
dotted serpent, C(jiled round a tree, " keeps a watc 
the world." He wanders aimlessly, dreammg of tht 
le past 
See him standing, dewlap-deep 
In the rushes at the lake, 
Surly, stupid, half asleep,. 
Wailing fur his heart to break ; 
And Ihe birds to join the ilies 
I'easting at his bloodshot eyes ; 
Standing with his head hung clown 
In a stupor, dreaming things: 
<;reen savannas, jungles brown. 
Battlefields and bellowings, 
i-Sulls undone and lions dead 
And vultures flapping overhead. 
He dreams of his early wanderings at his mother's tail, until 
he left her and " looked to her no more " ; of the growth Of 
his legs until the day's journeys were " not so long " ; of the 
emergence of his horns and his mock-battles with the other 
little bulls ; of his ambition to lead and his success ; of his 
lK)wer when " not a bull or cow that erred In the furnace 
of his look Dared a second worse rebuke " ; of snakes, 
leopards, lions and Iwars all in dread of him. Now he is 
supreme only in the delusions of his " daft old brain." .Only 
the tameless heart is as it was : 
Pity hint that he must wake ; 
JCven now the swarm of flies 
Blackening his bloodshot eyes 
Biirsts and blisters round the lalce. 
Scattered from the feast half-fed, 
By great sliadows overhead. 
And the dreamer turns away 
From his visionary herds 
.And his splendid yesterday, 
'i'urris to meet the loathly birds 
Flocking round him from the skies. 
Waiting for the flesh that dies. 
It is all the time a bull'with which we are feeling, and not a 
man in a bull's hide. The poem is perfect ; a greater success 
than The Song of Honour, not because of a greater degree of 
sincerity and vision in the author, but because he has chosen, 
in this instance, a single manageable symbol. Mr. Hodgson 
IS a poet of unusual infertility; but had he written nothing 
but The Bull, he would still have been remembered, '^ 
