Books: Disguised Poets

WHETHER A DOVE OR SEAGULL—Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland—Viking ($1.75).

Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot) and Valentine Ackland, a new writer, protest “against the frame of mind, too common, which judges the poem by the poet.” By lumping 109 poems together in Whether a Dove or Seagull without specifying which are by Poet Warner, which by Poet Ackland, they conspire to baffle lazy readers, force them to take or leave each verse on its own merits.

Dwelling on an English Parnassus which has a traditionally bucolic landscape, Authors Warner & Ackland have a modern liking for slow, casual rhythms, unobtrusive rhymes, which make their precise metaphors seem more surprising by contrast. They have the acute feeling for country sights & sounds at which Anglo-Saxon poets are supposed to excel: for them the air often seems

freesia-sweet, Piteous, to eye and ear, as a lamb’s bleat.

Though denied the use of their parents’ names, most of the lyrics in Whether a Dove or Seagull have a determinedly casual stance which suggests a male forbear: U. S. Poet Robert Frost, to whom the authors acknowledge an obvious debt in their dedication. Like him, they refuse to sentimentalize their fondness for nature, insist on its hostility to humans as well as its charm. But while robust Poet Frost nevertheless finds permanent solace among his Vermont hills and pastures, in the minds of Poets Warner & Ackland the bryony and woodbine of which they are fond are entangled with feelings of transiency which wither much of their charm.

Stand up, O homing phantom, stand up intact and declare The goodness of earth the greatest good you found, Ere the wind jolts you, and you vanish like the foam.