14 
LAND 6? WATER 
September 12, 1918 
Life and Letters oyJ.CSquire 
A Long War Poem 
MR MAURICE HEWLETT'S career as a 
writer has been a very remarkable one. He 
made a vast popular success twenty years ago 
with The Forest Lovers, followed up by Richard 
Yea and Nay and The Queen's Quair. He 
then wrote possibly, twenty novels, varying in quality, and 
several books of verse — mostly on classical subjects — which 
compelled respect, but, save in patches, not enthusiasm. Then, 
suddenly, at an age when most men begin to flag in energy 
and repeat their old storiesrather tiresomely, he produced a 
long poem. The Song of the Plow, unique in kind and, in quahty, 
higher than anything he had previously written. It was not a 
solitary flash ; it was the first leap of a new fire. In The Village 
Wife's Lament (Seeker, 3s. 6d. net) he has produced a poem 
shorter and in quite another categorj.-, which would have 
kept his name alive had he never written anything else. 
♦ *♦♦•* 
The subject is a very ordinary and very obvious one ; the 
same might be said of the subjects of most considerable 
poems with "stories" in them. As a modern poet (Mr; 
Gordon Bottomley) has said, we have no need to speculate 
as to what the epics of the lost Continent of Atlantis were 
about ; they were about a man who gave himself for his 
fellows, a woman for whom men fought, a man who wan- 
dered for years and at last came home. The categories of 
tragedy are few : it is in form, in setting, in imaginative 
detail, in the creation of new characters for old experiences, 
that poets show their -individuahty. Love and grief are 
perpetual ; new stories of love and grief we shall always 
have. Mr. Hewlett's story is that of a shepherd's wife whose 
man goes off to the war, leaving her with a child. The child 
dies ; the man is killed ; the woman is left alone, and tells 
her story. The event is common ; the subject is not uncom- 
mon ; but no one has told it so well before, and although the 
war and its results have produced many fine lyrics it has 
produced no long poem which compares with Mr. Hewlett's. 
» ♦ ♦ • « * 
The story might be told baldly and unimaginatively ; it 
might be told melodramatically, with an excessive piling up 
of terrible accessories and an over-stressing of "the pathetic 
fallacy." There are living poets who might between them 
have fallen into both these errors. Mr. Hewlett has taken 
the middle and the best path. He does not introduce an 
unrealistic and stagy' violence, and he does not use the story 
as a mere hook on which to hang crimson flowers of extrava- 
gant language. On the other hand, he does not restrict 
himself to words that his village wife might have used and 
conceptions she might have grasped. " I have put," he says, 
"into the mouth of my village wife thoughts which she may 
never have formulated, but which, I am very sure, lie in her 
heart, top deep for any utterance but that of tears." In 
other words, he has used his imagination ; formulated for 
his heroine things that she could not' formulate, but only 
feel ; endowed her with his own perceptions and language. 
It is the only reasonable thing to do ; after all, neither a 
village wife nor anybody else talks in rhymed verse, and 
even the baldest poetry is, in a sense, artificial. The test is 
whether or not the reader is "pulled up." 
♦ «♦»*» 
It is not an easy poem from which to quote ; the poet has 
Ijeen too centred upon his theme ; too contemptuous of the 
merely decorative detail. All the elementary emotions of 
motherhood and wifehood are exposed, and truthfully ; but at 
a length too great to admit of example here. I cannot bring 
myself to do less than quote several stanzas in succession ; 
and these might be chosen from anywhere, from the scenes 
of girlhood, from the extraordinarily vivid sketch of domestic 
service in town and on a"farm, or from the last outburst of 
the extreme abandonment of grief. I will take them from 
that section which shows the war invading the remote 
countrj'side ; the men talking ; the young men gradually, 
for motives nobler than they could say, going : 
But as the tide crawls to his full 
Without your knowing. 
Invading rock and filling pool. 
Endlessly flowing ; 
Lo, while you sit and look at it. 
Idle, little thinking, 
The flood is brimming at your feft. 
Lipping there and winking — 
The very same the Great War grew ; 
Like a flowing tide 
It spread its channels thro' and thro' 
The quiet countryside. 
One day you'd stop : a poster up. 
And Lord, how it glared ! 
The next there'd be a very crop. 
And not a body stared. 
And then the lorries flung along , 
By ones and twos, and then 
In snaky line some twenty strong. 
Full of shouting men. 
They made me blench with noise and stench, 
But, more, I do believe. 
To know them gaining inch by inch 
The earth whereby we live. 
So faded fast the painted past 
Beneath the mist of war ; 
One could not think life had been cast 
. In sweet lines before 
There was no Ust in that red mist 
For love or wholesome breath. 
But making rage our staple grist 
Wejground the dust of death. 
' Our men held talk among themselves, 
( But said little to we ; 
And soon they went by tens and twelves 
Soldiers to be. 
I knew how 'twould be from the first, 
I think my heart could tell ; 
^ I loved a man who never durst 
Not do well. 
Now I have quoted it I feel I should have quoted something 
else, something to show the tensity of the feeling, the beauty 
of the slight background, the proportion, and the frequent 
exquisite music of the poem. But the thing is a whole, 
and whatever had been quoted I should have felt the same 
dissatisfaction. 
At the end. Mr. Hewlett appends a "Note," explaining 
that the poem is dramatic, and that he is not to be supposed 
answerable for all that it expresses. "My own convictions- 
about aggressive war are very much" those of my village 
wife. Of defensive war, of war to save the lives of our 
children, of war to save humanity itself, there cannot be 
two sane opinions : that is a pious duty forced upon us : 
but it becomes every day more inconceivable to me how 
men can engage in the other kind of war." "The village 
wife knows nothing of Germans, however, and her reproaches 
strike at the heart of mankind. . . . Let us learn to look 
war in the face, and while the blood is cold,' so that we may 
know what we are meaning to do." Those to whom Mr. Hew- 
lett's meaning is self-evident and those to whom his opinions 
were previously known, may think such a commentary on a 
dramatic work superfluous. But it is obvious why he has 
written it. There are, over and above the small minority of 
people who (usually from a distance) enjoy war and think it the 
only thing that makes life worth living, a great many who, 
from thnidity or bad logic, suspect every man who emphasises 
the terrible side of the war whilst it is in process of deliberately 
sapping the national will to go on. They are afraid that if 
the truth is told the nation will collapse out of sheer horror. 
It ie to them clear that we should pretend not to know the 
agony and filth of the battle-field, the broken lives at home. 
The effort at concealment at this stage is^of course, ridiculously 
futile ; but even were it not, the attitude is surely a false 
one. Our resolution does not need to be supported bv 
suppressions and lies ; we do not need to forget what war is 
like to resist' the spirit of war incarnate ; and the greatest 
testimony to the justice of our cause is the fact that the 
war has been supported by a multitude of men and women 
who hated war, who knew what it was like, and who were 
aware of what it would bring to themselves and to their 
fellows. It is the worst of mistakes to leave those who 
would have given the Germans a walk-over a monopoly of 
pity, of sympathy, and, in this one regard, of truth. What- 
ever the war is like, whatever its origins and its rights, men 
are killed, and the simple wives of simple husbands must be 
overwhelmed by their losses, and revolt, even unreasoningly, 
against the bestial machinery that has ruined their lives. 
This Mr. Hewlett has seen. 
