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The Poetry of Robert Buchanan by T. L. Adamson
From The Poetry Review (July-August, 1929) THE POETRY OF ROBERT BUCHANAN ROBERT BUCHANAN was born in Caverswall in Lancashire of Scottish parents on August 18th, 1841. His father was a keen follower of Robert Owen, the Socialist poet, and at one time used to stump the country as a controversialist on the side of Free Thought. When he moved to London, his house in Norwood became a rallying point for all types of apostles of progress. It was in this stimulating atmosphere of free and frank discussion that young Robert, an only child, spent his earliest years. He had a boy’s ordinary affection for his father, but for his mother an overmastering worship that remained steadfast throughout her long life of eighty years. It is only natural that his mother idolised him. As a boy he was never happy away from her, and sheltered from adverse influences, his naturally sensitive nature became over-sensitive and too highly strung, and proved a handicap to him in the rough and tumble of later years. Although he had no formal religious teaching from his parents, his mother developed and deepened his sympathy with others and his instinctive hatred of injustice and oppression. At the age of ten his father moved to Scotland, and young Robert soon learned the meaning of intolerance, for, as the son of a free-thinking father in a land of the strictest orthodoxy, he was treated as a social outcast. His resentment of this treatment culminated in his being expelled from a school at Rothesay for being restless and mutinous.
But his Scottish environment was not all unhappiness. Poetry was in that Scottish air, and he drank it in with a growing delight. At that period poems were read and discussed in every village in the neighbourhood; indeed, there were few villages that could not boast a poet who had appeared in print. Then with all his boyish soul hungry for the greatest poetry he was taken to see the actor Vandenhoff in King Lear. It was his first real contact with Shakespeare. The effect of that first contact on an artistic mind is always profoundly interesting. On one it may be the harmonious beauty of the language, on another the wonderful imagery, on a third the marvellous insight into character that makes the greatest impression. But let Buchanan himself tell us what appealed to him. “It swept me beyond myself when I was a boy. I feel now, as I felt then, the unapproachable truth and sublimity of such passages as the one in Act III, where the storm-beaten monarch first realises the mystery of human wretchedness and pain. Here the very quick of pity is touched. . . . The influence on my own character of this masterpiece was deep and abiding. I first gained from it that perception of the piteousness of life which has been, despite all aberrations into contemporary savagery, the inspiration of all my writings. To me the storm-tossed figure of Lear represented humanity itself, swept hither and thither by the elemental and seemingly aimless cruelty of nature, yet coming at last to anchorage and an equally elemental peace and calm. I was taught by the contemplation of his wretchedness, as he himself was taught by personal strife and sorrow, to feel for that sorrow of which I had hitherto taken ‘too little heed’.” It is on the poems with this inspiration that Buchanan’s claim to greatness must rest.
At the age of nineteen, he came to London with a friend and fellow poet, David Gray, to try his fortunes. Gray lived but a short time leaving his sorrowing friend to struggle on alone. After a hard fight, Buchanan gradually won recognition not only as a poet but also as a novelist, essayist, biographer, critic, and playwright. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in his prime Robert Buchanan was the most versatile man in England, with the possible exception of Lord Lytton. It was during this hard fight for recognition that he narrowly escaped disaster. Young and very proud, he sometimes felt acutely and resented bitterly the patronising way in which Mr. Maxwell, a newspaper proprietor, occasionally received him. So one morning he picked up a parcel of MS., procured a thick cudgel and went to see Mr. Maxwell, fully intending (to use his own words) “to beat out what brains the ruffian possessed and offer him up as a sacrifice to the Muses!” Buchanan says he was really in earnest, but fortunately his reception on that occasion was friendly, and the cudgel was not even hinted at during the interview. It is an example of the lengths to which an oversensitive man is sometimes prepared to go.
Throughout a lifetime that only lasted sixty years, Buchanan’s energy seemed inexhaustible. Despite all his other activities, including the long and bitter controversy with what he called The Fleshly School of Poetry, his literary output was enormous, his poems alone running to over 1,000 pages, in double columns, of closely printed type. This article is solely concerned with his poems, in which his range was as great as his output. Sonnets, lyrics, ballads, narrative and dramatic poems all came easily from his pen, but his greatest work is to be found in his poems of the life of the underworld of London, and in a series of mystical poems in which he embodied with a fine imagination his theories of the ultimate meaning of life.
Let us first turn to his lyrics, many of which are embedded in his longer poems. Here is a stanza from “A Spring Song in the City.”
“Little barefoot maiden,
Selling violets blue,
Hast thou ever pictured
Where the sweetlings grew?—
Oh, the warm wild woodland ways,
Deep in dewy grasses,
Where the wind-blown shadow strays,
Scented as it passes!”
And another from “The Birth of Balder” in “Balder the Beautiful”:—
“There blent with his growing,
The leaf and the flower
The wind lightly blowing
Its balm from afar,
The smile of the sunshine
The sob of the shower,
The beam of the moonshine,
The gleam of the star.
’Mid shining of faces
And waving of wings,
With gifts from all places
Came beautiful things;
The blush from the blossom,
The bloom from the corn,
Blent into his bosom,
Ere Balder was born.”
Is not this word pattern pleasing with its delightful interweaving of the richer vowel sounds?
The following is from “The Outcast.”
“And slowly, softly, down the night
O’er the smooth black and glistering sea,
The starry urns of crystal light
Were filled and emptied momently!
Then in the centre of the glimmer
The round moon ripen’d as she rose,
And covered with the milk-white shimmer
The glassy waters took repose;
And round the isle a murmur deep
Of troubled surges half asleep
Broke faintlier and faintlier
As midnight took her shadowy throne;
In heaven, on earth, no breath, no stir,
No sound, save that deep slumbrous tone!
Wonder of darkness!—’neath its wing
All living things sank slumbering.”
“The Wedding of Shon Maclean” is a bagpipe melody which tells us that Buchanan was by no means an anchorite or a mere visionary, but a man whose feet were on the earth and who was fully appreciative of the joys of conviviality. I defy any Scotsman to read the chorus of this ballad without some stirring of his pulse!
“To the wedding of Shon Maclean,
Twenty Pipers together
Came in the wind and the rain
Playing across the heather;
Backward their ribbons flew,
Blast upon blast they blew,
Each clad in tartan new
Bonnet and blackcock feather:
And every Piper was fou,
Twenty Pipers together”:
with the inevitable conclusion!
And now let us turn to the more serious works of Robert Buchanan. Chief among these are the London Poems, which he wrote a few years after he came to London. I have already mentioned that his struggle was a hard one, and in the course of that struggle he came into close touch with the underworld of London. His natural sympathy with suffering and injustice was quickened, and in London Poems he expresses his sympathy with types of humanity that are not usually food for poetic thought.
Mr. J. A. Noble, in an introduction to some of Robert Buchanan’s poems, has said that: “Years before Buchanan was born, Thomas Hood had sung of the suicide of an ‘unfortunate’ and by so singing had triumphantly defied the traditions of poetical responsibility.Still in the midst of the defiance, there was a suggestion of compromise. Hood did not dare to be quite true to the actual, and the picture was accordingly touched up. We know that any picture of a subject such as that treated in the ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ in which there appears ‘only the beautiful’ is not simply an idealisation, but a transformation of reality; and while true idealisation enhances this, false idealisation detracts from the value of any work of art in which it is found. There are two errors into one of which those poets who deal in homely and human themes are apt to fall. The first is that of men who, like Hood, preserve the poetry by keeping back some of the truth; the second is that of a writer like Crabbe, who lets us see all the truth but seems unable to show us the underlying poetry.” In Robert Buchanan, he says, we find both truth and poetry.
One of the London Poems is “In Tiger Bay.” A man sees in a dream a tigress watching and finally killing a sleeping negro. Then he sees a “tigress-woman” watching and thirsting to kill a dying sailor in a garret for the sake of his money. But
And she does not kill him.
Then follows an impassioned protest by the dreamer to God who made both the tigress and the “tigress-woman.” God’s reply is one of the most beautiful things that Buchanan ever wrote. Here, indeed, is power, sincerity and serenity.
“. . . Only a spark!
So faint as yet, and so dim to mark,
. . . . .
Fan it, feed it, in love and duty,
. . . . .
Till it burns the bestial frame and face
To its own dim beauty. . . .”
Two other London Poems almost as powerful and imaginative are “Nell,” which describes the sorrows of an unmarried mother on the day her man is hanged for murder, and “Liz”, the pathetic tale of another unmarried mother, who dies leaving a little boy for her Joe.
In all these London Poems, sad as they are, there is a strong under-current of unquenchable hope. However degraded, demoralised or bestial a human being might appear to be, Buchanan still believed that the great God or good which rules the world had implanted a “spark,” and that in that “spark” was ever the possibility of ultimate redemption. Throughout his life this belief was of the very fibre of his being.
This same unquenchable hope of redemption is instinct in his “Ballad of Judas Iscariot,” in which the soul of Judas Iscariot, after vainly trying to bury his body, at long last finds forgiveness of the Bridegroom, who is Christ. The form of this poem is reminiscent of The Ancient Mariner.
London Poems may be described as the expression of Buchanan’s imagination of what happens before the veil. In his Book of Orm, the Celt are his imaginings of what happens behind the veil. In the final vision of Orm is another and even more brilliant flight of the imagination on the theme of the redeeming power of love. God’s judgment has been pronounced and all the world, save one man, has been redeemed. That man had sinned all sins; his soul was “a blackness and foul odour.” He is unrepentant, has no desire for any contact with good, but finally makes one appeal to God.
“. . . He is content to dwell
In the Cold Clime for ever, so thou sendest
A face to look upon, a heart that beats,
A hand to touch—albeit like himself,
Black, venomous, unblest, exiled and base:
Give him this thing, he will be very still,
Nor trouble thee again.”
Only two in Heaven are willing to go to comfort him—the one his mother whom he slew in anger, the other his wife whom “he stript, with ravenous claws, of raiment and of food.” They go. Their love overcomes him. “For an alien sound, a piteous human cry, a sob forlorn, thrilled to the heart of Heaven” and “The Man is saved; let the Man enter in!”
The same thought is lightly touched on in The Outcast. This somewhat bitter poem is, however, chiefly interesting in providing a comparison of two poets in their expression of similar ideas.
In The Outcast we read:
This seems to find a distant echo in
And again
might almost have directly inspired:
Robert Buchanan and Francis Thompson certainly had affinities.
In conclusion, here are two sonnets typical of many written during a holiday by Lake Coruisk.
The Cup of Tears. My God! My God! with passionate appeal
Pardon I crave for these mad moods of mine—
Can I remember, with no heart to feel,
The gift of Thy dear Son, the Man Divine—
My God! what agonies of love were Thine,
Sitting alone, forgotten, on Thy height,
Pale, powerless, awful in that Lonely Light,
While ’neath Thy feet the cloudy hyaline
Rain’d blood upon the darkness—where Thine Own
Held the black Cup of all earth’s tears, and cried!
Ev’n then, tho’ Thou wert conscious of his groan,
Pale in that Lonely Light Thou did’st abide,
Nor dared, even then, tho’ shaken on Thy throne,
To reach Thy hand and dash the Cup aside. The Happy Hearts of Earth. Whence thou hast come, thou knowest not, little Brook,
Nor whither thou art bound. Yet wild and gay,
Pleased in thyself, and pleasing all that look,
Thou wendest, all the seasons, on thy way;
The lonely glen grows gladsome with thy play,
Thou glidest lamb-like through the ghostly shade;
To think of solemn things thou wast not made,
But to sing on, for pleasure, night and day.
Such happy hearts are wandering, crystal clear,
In the great world where men and women dwell;
Earth’s mighty shows they neither love nor fear,
They are content to be, while I rebel,
Out of their own delight dispensing cheer,
And ever softly whispering, “All is well!”
Buchanan appears to be a neglected poet to-day, but in his best poems there is an imaginative power, an individual beauty of expression and above all, such a strong and tender human sympathy that he must surely in the years to come win a place among the Immortals. T. L. ADAMSON. (Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) |
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