Concerning Ruth Pitter
Munson, Gorham
472 T H E C O M M O N W E A L September I I, 1929 to be ensamples to the flock. So it is with all positions of authority in every human relationship. The author- ity of a husband over his...
...True Christian authority has always been softened CONCERNING By GORHAM and sweetened by humility...
...What won't they say in Paris when they hear of this...
...Hilaire Belloc and Mr...
...It was peculiarly Parisian...
...A gemmy archipelago The gemmy waters bore, And all these sprites that are unchained of woe Do dwell there evermore...
...The extravagant sunset that evening made an alluring background for the mosque of Saint Sofia and the forest of minarets that flank the far side of the Golden Horn...
...The first of her poems I shall quote is Sturdy Thieves : Whit out of the wood That killest king's game for food, What is the staff to bring the blood Why, I say surely, good oak or holly...
...They are in essence religious, but attached to no church or creed...
...472 T H E C O M M O N W E A L September I I, 1929 to be ensamples to the flock...
...His clear eyes and general poise bespoke the officer of quick and accurate judgment...
...On the eve of the departure of one of the destroyer divisions to home waters, the Bainbrldge, under the command of the late Lieutenant Commander W. Atlee Edwards, came alongside for stores in much the same smart way as she had approached a French transport a few months before, when her captain won the Congressional Medal of Honor...
...Tiens...
...This--and with it I group such poems as The Realm, Pastoral with Artifice, and the song which begins with the lines The end of true love is to sit and mourn...
...Mon Dieu...
...The medal was about the size of a halfdollar...
...An awareness of this troubles one's confidence in the judgment of posterity...
...September II, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 473 and all the rest, about the frogs as watch dogs, the old king supping with the queen of the Northern Lights, and the theft of little Bridget...
...He can also make those elucidatory comparisons that are another critical device for trying to state what is unstatable in terms of ideas...
...Fluting in winds and praying in still airs, Missaled in flowers and merry in green leaves...
...And heaven shall smile that I forget my soul, And frown not...
...No more can criticism draw forth a "message" from Miss Pitter's works...
...Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth...
...Certainly there is no human sentiment in Ariel's song, and though the spirit plays with our emotions it does not share them...
...I have mentioned a climb, and indeed it is the increasing elevation of Miss Pitter's poetry that is most astonishing...
...His knowledge of French made this function agreeable, especially to those whose lives he had saved...
...Belloc does this, choosing passages from Edith Sitwell and Rudyard Kipling to place beside Miss Pitter's The Swan...
...But if it declines, even from our standards, extinction will probably be the fate of her noble music...
...even Spain had a smart cruiser there...
...A minute selection will display the steepness of the ascent...
...This is a resurrection," said Belloc, "of what people have forgotten...
...O brethren, tell...
...Dreadnoughts were anchored within sight of the sultan's palace--a gesture in sea-power calculated to be fearful in the eyes of the Turk but reassuring to the other nationals ashore, as a guarantee of protection, should one of the daily crises become a catastrophe...
...Tell me the history of it...
...All but two of the transport's personnel and passengers had been taken on board the American craft...
...But is the taste of posterity ideal...
...So let us say, if the taste of the next age is superior to ours, it will find the poetry of Ruth Pitter one of the highest accomplishments in English literature of our era...
...The man who exercises authority with a proud spirit may be obeyed for a time by unwilling subjects, but his commands will accomplish nothing permanent that can be built up into the kingdom of God...
...Pity me The effect is strange, and it is not human...
...Again look to ourselves: we are now cast as successor of that Prince Posterity to whom The Tale of a Tub was dedicated, and who would say that we understood and appreciated half so well the skilful varied simplicity of Swift's prose as did his contemporaries...
...But perhaps it was a visitation of what Poe, that pas...
...Any therefore that grieves For all these sturdy thieves, Hearken now wiseman, that believes They will be, while there be oak or holly...
...Why, I say surely, good oak or holly...
...Atlee Edwards told us of an incident that occurred at the burning of the Vinh-Long...
...The priest was in ecstasy...
...But it is necessary to look to our own taste, less Time, whom Swift figured as the tutor of Prince Posterity, sweep hastily into oblivion such masterpieces as our age may bring forth and fail to recognize...
...We too denounce our age, but not as burningly as Miss Pitter in Confusion which closes: But until then, woe on this weary time, Whose kings are naught, with angels for their fools, Misers for ministers, graces for scullions, And every good that can be named of man Bruised unto death, beggared and spat upon...
...Or rive the forest like a wind from hell, Still will I follow and that lightsomely...
...Then with great feeling the old priest detached from his watch chain the medal...
...Then turn to The Fairies, by William Allingham: Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go ahuntlng For fear of little men...
...Tiens...
...tached from them...
...like a distant but very bright light...
...One can deal with heard melodies, but those unheard come thronging on the inner ear as poetry becomes more intense and finer and breath-taking, and with unheard melodies the critic can do nothing but listen...
...More is demanded of the reader as the poet's emotion ascends to stranger regions...
...This is true wherever authority is exercised, whether it be by the policeman or the Pope...
...is to me indisputably the refimergence of Elizabethan sentiment...
...Some words are no doubt expected on Miss Pitter's technique and on her "message...
...When Ariel sings "Full fathom five thy father lies," it has been said that the spirit is so far above us that it is...
...We exchanged greetings and I accepted his invitation to dinner...
...Par miracle, I once did go, And stood upon the shore...
...The truth is, the greater beauties in poetry cannot be demonstrated...
...sionate struggler for precision, named supernal beauty...
...I believe that all these comparisons with writers of some merit would be to Miss Pitter's advantage, but they are not in keeping with my aim here...
...Mr...
...We called it "pagan": it was as though we had felt something that this ancient soil was experiencing alien to our circle of experience...
...It is our duty to see that rumor of her is spread so that her gifts may have a fair trial by Time...
...Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn...
...THE CAPTAIN'S MEDAL By WILLIAM A. MAGUIRE T WAS in May, :[923, at Constantinople, when a large force of United States destroyers operated in Turkish waters...
...Mute in the mortal voice, but tunable, Most tunable, the where all else is death...
...Miss Pitter employs set frames--the sonnet, rondeau, ballade, definite stanzaic patterns, and so on--to trammel her impulses to sing, and she achieves the old miracle of appearing easy and poised and spontaneous despite the restrictions of the chosen shapes...
...It was a flash of true insight that led the Police Commissioner of New York to suggest as the slogan for all the members of the New York police force these simple words, "At your service...
...It was a divine inspiration that led the successors of Saint Peter from the earliest times, in all their official utterances, to sign themselves, "Servant of the servants of God...
...Of a total of 495 on board, 482 [men, women and children] were rescued by his coolness, judgment and professional skill, which were combined with a degree of heroism that must reflect new glory on the United States navy...
...I despair of defining it, for who can define the appeal of Keats's lines...
...Two remained: the captain and the chaplain of the troops, an old priest of the Dominican order...
...The student on fuller acquaintance can make his own notes on her triumphs of workmanship : the boldness of the metaphors, the flexibility of her lines, her skill in assonance and internal rhyming, the restoration of "poetic language...
...RUTH PITTER B. MUNSON E COMMONLY attribute to posterity an ideal taste...
...Perhaps that is why older poets invented non-human beings such as sprites, fairies, elves, when they wished to play with human emotions and yet be perfectly de...
...Lieutenant Commander Edwards," so runs the citation, "placed his vessel alongside the bow of the French military transport, Vinh-Long [destroyed by fire in the Sea of Marmora] and in spite of several violent explosions . . . maintained his ship in that position until all who were alive were taken on board...
...So it is with all positions of authority in every human relationship...
...His father was in the diplomatic service...
...He was a man of medium height...
...Her securities against the annihilating breath of the future are two small books: First Poems (Swift, 192o ) and First and Second Poems (Sheed and Ward, 1927...
...Not at all pantheistic or mystical...
...I awaited my chance and then asked if I might examine it...
...Edwards stood on the well deck of his destroyer and greeted the priest and the French captain as they climbed aboard...
...or thy silver tra~cklngs Are thorough heaven, where I shall light me down When that thou stayest, and the world is burned...
...A lovely medal, captain," I said, aimost caressing the thing...
...Ecstasy is very rare...
...The unfoiled spirit still doth seek perfection," she sings, and it is the search and struggle for spiritual perfection that is the inmost mark of the religious...
...Elfin heart I may not know...
...Taste changes, but it may also in successive changes sink lower and lower for centuries...
...A. R. Orage, but neither they nor her books have made any appreciable impression on English readers of poetry...
...But the summit of poetry is of course not harmonies from elfland but ecstasy...
...Because England has failed in responsiveness, America has never been tested by Miss Pitter's poetry.* It is my purpose, formed not quickly like that of a reviewer who each month finds a book a little better written than the average and forthwith makes his pen stutter with excited praise, but deliberately after a year of reading and rereading First and Second Poems, to say to American lovers of poetry: "Here is one who is not a ragged pilgrim going toward Parnassus, but one who actually dwells on that magic mountain and has climbed from its lower slopes to the upper air where true excellence alone can live...
...All their ways with flowers strow, For they see What to us is mystery, Far forgotten, long ago...
...And Sim out of the shaw That hath the eye of the daw, What helpeth thee against the law...
...The old priest was amazed at Edwards's accent...
...One saw life in the raw when the new republic of Turkey was aborning...
...Miss Pitter has written a number of poems, such as The Dead Fay, Well Beloved, September Night, which are so impersonal in their feeling that one is tempted to call them non-human, and for that term I shall have to pay with an explanation...
...able emotion...
...Just as it is by his song, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," that Ben Jonson lives for most readers and not by his comedies of humors, so it is by her verse of sentiment that Ruth Pitter is most likely to evoke popular delight...
...The sinister type of our ship belied its mission, for our task was to build up rather than to destroy the social fabric of unhappy humanity...
...Nearly every maritime nation of the world flew its flag in that region at the stern of a warship...
...Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather...
...After this, for a poetic experience of still another order, read The Song of the Indian Maid, selected from Endymion...
...But I shall ask the reader to open first his Oxford Book of English Verse and spend a few minutes in the reading of Sir Philip Sidney's The Bargain : My true love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for another given, and the following lines, perfect of their kind...
...Sweetly shall I be shrived of weariness And rest, rest, rest--and yet be large in life If thou extend one fold of thine apparel For silken mail, bright harness marvelous...
...If Time finds that we have left no record of them and have carelessly buried them in mountainous piles of discarded books, the Prince will never even hear of their titles...
...His shipmates have since told me that this sort of nervousness was characteristic of him...
...Without comment, I shall let In Praise stand as an offering which alone, even if Miss Pitter had written nothing else, should suffice to establish her in the small company of English lyricists who have nearly reached the crown of Parnassus: O sing of all thy saints, friend Poesy, Thy company incomparable hymn forth...
...Only first I shall present for examination one of her poems of that kind: it is called The Elfin Heart: They that have the elfin heart Cannot weep In the desert they would sleep While the lion watched apart...
...This bears the authentic mark and it will tell...
...And Charles out of the chase That leaves no hide in his place, What is thy charm against disgrace Why, I say surely, good oak or holly...
...Gladly, padre," he said...
...The Bosphorus was completely in the hands of the Allies...
...Our Lord laid down this fundamental principle when He called attention to the difference between the authority that was exercised by the kings of the Gentiles and that which should be exercised among His followers...
...Miss Pitter shows us the splendor of the feelings associated with a striving for perfection, and it is that splendor that we have forgotten ever existed when we turn our backs upon the past in the name of so-called modern progress...
...The Waters of Paradise is given in full to close this essay and to show the kind of beauty that has redeemed Miss Pitter from nervous exacerbation, cynicism, complacency, unbalanced sensuality, and all the other personal concerns of a typical modern versifier...
...Those who exercise authority in meekness and humility are everywhere met with a glad obedience and an enthusiastic response...
...It was nearly the hour for dinner and I was about to lay below to my stateroom when I discovered an old shipmate on the navigating bridge of Edwards's ship...
...This is my most precious souvenir...
...Like to the summer leaves that make A little whispering, These folk that dwellen in the lake Full fairly say and sing, As waters blown at night, that wake With a sweet murmuring...
...But we have lost the power of paradisiacal vision, dependent in no wise on literal beliefs, but constructed from a rich sense of color and sound and the pure emotions of wonder and bliss...
...The authority of a husband over his wife means simply that he is to encourage her and help her to adhere to the way of salvation...
...We are in another world, a moon-struck one as it happens in Poe's Annabel Lee, or an absolutely unformulable one as in Kubla Khan...
...Fresh in feeling, spirited in composition, pastoral in quality, they shed on us the merry rays of the soul of a green England miraculously unsooted with factory smoke: they revive in us long-memoried sentimental associations with the land of Robin Hood, of Thomas Lodge, of Drake, of Corin and Sylvius and Phoebe...
...those who will listen to elfin music are not an army...
...stay at home, Sing lullaby to babes, and so will I. Play with a blade of grass, 'tis beautiful...
...I had never met Atlee Edwards, although his name was known to me long before the episode in the Sea of Marmora...
...They have eyes dark and deep, And their look As a pool in forest brook, _As a tam on mountain steep, As a spell, doth calmness keep, Sealed book...
...And though no sail move on the deep As calm as any mere, A radiant folk, who may not weep, Without a sall do steer, And very pleasant ways and winding keep Above the solemn clear...
...An easier task is to compare her with her contemporaries...
...Later, in the cabin, after Edwards had personally arranged for the comfort of the refugees, the bearded chaplain inquired as to the origin of the American commander's knowledge of French...
...This glorious feat of Edwards was still the popular topic of conversation in all the wardrooms of the ships then cruising in Turkish waters...
...As Edwards joined in the jolly repartee of the mess he unconsciously twirled, with his index finger, a gold medal which hung suspended from his watch chain...
...Heigh-ho, the end of love...
...Then Edwards explained that he had studied as a boy at the Dominican College in Paris...
...Yet as I stood on the deck of my own ship I could visualize the other scene...
...Atlee Edwards still professed sympathy for the Armenians, in spite of the vogue of damning them because of the few who converted the lot of the refugee into an easy avocation...
...And without the seeking for perfection, these virtues appear to degenerate into credulity, sentimentality, optimism, moral conformity and ambition, just as a bell tent falls all awry without a centre pole...
...But only lesser beauties can be demonstrated...
...Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together...
...In paradise there is a sea Blue as the turkis stone, And many passing wonders be Hid in its depths alone, But seen of all the folk of neighbor land, Whose quiet feet do walk the yellow strand...
...Who has not felt, occasionally and rarely, a disruption in the round of close, familiar human feelings and been seized fleetingly by a state of impersonal delight...
...Send me not forth, for I am loth to go...
...Ecstasy is a word too often profaned by critics for me to profane it...
...Neither have they friend or foe...
...How it mounts in ecstatic revelry as it celebrates the coming of Bacchus and his kin...
...I recall a short walk in the night with a companion in Brittany when with no apparent cause we were both taken by an indescrib...
...I was introduced to him at table in the rather diminutive wardroom of the Bainbridge...
...The Dial has recently published two poems by Miss Pitter...
...Bridge, a "beef-boat," serving the twenty odd destroyers of the force which the American High Commissioner, Admiral Mark Bristol, commanded in the near East...
...Who are they...
...I believe that Ruth Pitter frequently, sometimes in two or three lines, sometimes in whole poems, inducts us into experiences that, speaking figuratively, are not 474 THE COMMONWEAL September II, I929 germane to our planet but belong to "faery lands forlorn" on other planets...
...Please accept this...
...I had recently returned from the Black Sea where our destroyer had sailed to Odessa in the north and to Samsun on the southern shore...
...The passion for perfection is fed by and itself gives sustenance to faith, love, hope, the sense of righteousness, aspiration, and all the other qualities once called noble that seem to animate the content of this poetry I am praising...
...I am fidelity that still abideth Both poor and gentle in all righteousness And keeps the door, both for to hearken thee, And through the wicket call to wayfarers Like throstle in cold harborage of spring, Some notes of thee, with bright eye and still plume And passioned throat, and never a thought but song...
...An American critic might choose one of her love poems to match against one of Miss Edna Millay's, one of her nature lyrics to one of Robert Frost's and one of her symbolic poems to one of Hart Crane's...
...The authority of parents over their children imposes an obligation on the parents to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord~ The authority of the employer over those who are working for him means nothing more than that he should serve them in every possible way, so as to enable them to live as human beings and attain to the true end for which God has created them...
...Do ye know Why the winter's folding snow, And the wild wolves' hungry yell, Fright them not, and where they go Sans farewell...
...Close the anthology, begin to read in Miss Pitter's volume, and before long you will be astonished to discover that she has the freedom of the range from Sir Philip Sidney to John Keats...
...I was too charitable to my generation...
...You, my dear captain, one of our boys...
...Call war, I am a legion...
...The circumstances were not the same...
...September II, I9z 9 THE COMMONWEAL 475 And since that shore is void of man No sail about it flies, But hundred-hued Leviathan Like a prone rainbow lies, And looketh on the weaving waters wan With stilly emerald eyes...
...On these occasions we are remote from our human world...
...Mine was a roving commission that took me on frequent trips into the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean...
...He jerked his watch from his pocket and handed me the whole combination, including a gold pencil on the opposite end of the chain...
...Many poets show a remarkable variety on the same level of feeling, but here is a poet who reveals variety in the degrees of her elevation...
...He had all the air of a citizen of tile world without the concomitant cynicism so often noticeable then among our officers who had seen at close range "man's inhumanity to man" in the Levant...
...My permanent address, if there be such a thing as permanency in the naval service, was the U.S.S...
...I have not, in what has gone before, compared Miss Pitter with Ben Jonson, Coleridge, Shakespeare and the other great: I have attempted to say that she writes from the realms of feeling they expressed...
...Her advocates are two of the strictest judges of contemporary verse, Mr...
...It may have occurred as one glanced at the play of a cat in the sunlight or perused a passage in Alice in Wonderland...
...And when tears of mortals start, Silence keep...
...On one side I saw the image of a saint whose name is lost to me, and on the other side a representation of a French destroyer, steaming into a head sea...
...I will not count the dawns nor the moon's wanings, Nor see the errant tides dance up the strand, Unless it hap thou chant of the new day, Or of stars gathered in the golden sickle, Or the upleaping wild and fairy wave...
...The medal struck my fancy for the main reason that it appeared to have an image of a saint, in low relief, on one side of it...
Vol. 10 • September 1929 • No. 19
