Strong with strength that puts my strength to scorn - the voices of Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges had a scholar’s mastery of poetic form and a fine aesthetic sense.  He did not have a strong voice of his own – he barely had a weak voice – and had little to say that was original.  He made an ideal Poet Laureate.  Why waste the energies of a better poet.

Early on in the little Bridges collection I read there are twelve sonnets from an 1876 sequence that kept growing until there were almost eighty.  The sonnets sound like modernized Shakespeare.  Credibly imitating Shakespeare – impressive.  But it is an example of what I meant by Bridges having no voice:

I have no care for what was most my care,
But all around me see fresh beauty born,
And common sights grown lovelier than they were:
I dream of love, and in the light of morn
Tremble, beholding all things very fair
And strong with strength that puts my strength to scorn.  (ll. 9-14)

If I only quote from poems that contain the word “beauty” I will give an unbalanced – correct, but unbalanced – idea of Bridges.  “Low Barometer” (1921) is substantive and original.  A storm brings out a man’s restlessness:

On such a night, when Air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house.  Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.  (ll. 5-12)

He torments himself until the barometer and sun rise and “thrust / The baleful phantoms underground.”  The poem is pure pathetic fallacy made psychologically sharp.

A different kind of sharpness:

Would that you were alive today, Catullus!
Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us,
A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk,
Of no least sorry use on earth, but only
Fit in fancy to justify the outlay
Of your most horrible vocabulary.  (“To Catullus,” ll. 1-6)

Bridges does not say who he is attacking (“Ev’n now might he rejoice at our attention, / Guess’d he this little ode were aiming at him”), and if he encodes the name I cannot decipher it.  As good as this poem is, it is an imitation of Roman satire.  Bridges was an expert mimic, not a skill that is valued so highly now.

He was good with weather.  Look at the “London Snow”

Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
      Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
      Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.  (ll. 3-9)

It is snowing present participles; very clever.  The rhymes in this poem are clever, too.  Once people appear, the poem becomes less of a nature study and more of a ballad, the Ballad of the Winter Commuters:

    For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;
And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,
Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:
      But even for them awhile no cares encumber
Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,
The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber
At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.  (ll. 31-7)

There it is again, “beauty.”

The selection of Bridges included at the Poetry Foundation site, just nine poems, is ideal.

I too will something make - Robert Bridges makes poems

Robert Bridges is the poet I have at hand.  He had a long career, with his first book published in 1873 and his last in 1929.  He was close friends with Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his great contribution to poetry, greater than his own poems, was his 1918 edition of Hopkins’s work, almost thirty years after that poets death.  Somehow Bridges knew to wait for the perfect moment, when an audience trained on Modernism was ready for the sprung weirdness of Hopkins.

Bridges’s other great contribution, perhaps, was as a writer of hymns.  The Bridges collection I read, the 1955 Poetry & Prose, ed. John Sparrow, contains none of the hymns and makes no mention of them; nor does the Poetry Foundation biography.

I am just going to write about the lesser achievement of Robert Bridges, his regular old poems.  First, let us look at the testimonials of his contemporaries.  A poetry book of 200 pages includes 25 pages of the poet’s peers praising but also subtly belittling him.  Odd.

Yeats:  “an emotional purity and rhythmical delicacy no living man can equal…  the only poet, whose influence has always heightened and purified the art of others”  (p. xxxvii).

Lionel Johnson:  “These poems then, represent, with much else that is admirable, the scholarship of poetry…  he preserves discretion and propriety… making it impossible for him to outrage fine taste” (p. xxiv).

Arthur Symons:  “It is a kind of essence; it is what is imperishable in perfume; it is what is nearest in words to silence.”

Now there is some fine English Decadent twaddle.

Laurence Binyon: “His beauties are not easily detachable, but inhere in the substance of his work; he cannot be known in quotations”  (p. xxx).

Which will be trouble for me, so I will at this point include a complete poem:

I Love All Beauteous Things

I love all beauteous things,
      I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
      Is honoured for them.

I too will something make
      And joy in the making;
Altho’ to-morrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream
      Remembered on waking.  (1890)

Given the poem’s date, this may look like a standard declaration of Paterian art for art’s sake Decadence, but I do not think that is the case; I think that Bridges means every word.  He had fallen in love with and mastered the art of poetry even though he had little to say, he spent sixty years making beautiful things, culminating in his last poem, published on his 85th birthday, The Testament to Beauty.  Such is the well-lived life.

Die, song, die like a breath,
And wither as a bloom:
Fear not a flowery death,
Dread not an airy tomb!
Fly with delight, fly hence!
‘Twas thine love’s tender sense
To feast: now on thy bier
Beauty shall shed a tear.  (“I have loved flowers that fade, ll. 17-24, earlier than 1890)

I will see what I can do in one more post to breathe some life back into Bridges’s dead songs.