TO THE MEMORY
OF
MY FATHER
JOHN SYER BRISTOWE, M.D., F.R.S., LL.D.
THIS LITTLE BOOK
OF VERSE
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
LONDON, W.C. 1
ERSKINE MACDONALD, LTD.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright by Erskine MacDonald, Ltd.
in the United States of America.
First published October, 1918
The verses in this volume cover very many and various occasions; and aretherefore the very contrary of what is commonly called occasional verse.The term is used with a meaning that is very mutable; or with a meaningthat has been greatly distorted and degraded. Occasion should meanopportunity; and in the case of poetry it should rather meanprovocation. And the trick of writing upon what are called publicoccasions, instead of upon what may truly be described as privateprovocations, has been responsible for much verse which is not onlyinsufficient but insincere. It has produced not only many bad poems; butwhat is perhaps worse, many bad poems from many good poets. Thesincerity of Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poetry is perhaps most clearly provedby the number of points at which it touches life; and the spontaneity,or even suddenness, with which they are touched. It is an occasionalverse which arises out of real occasions, and not out of merelyfictitious or even merely formal ones. Thus while the one or two poemson the great war are probably the best, they are by no means thebiggest; they are not the most arresting in the sense of being the mostambitious. They are arresting because the great war really is great, andmoves an imaginative spirit to great issues; it is public but it is veryfar from being official. The war, indeed, is necessarily[Pg 8] more importantas a private event even than as a public event. And the few but finelines, on a brother fallen in a fight amid wild river that sundered manfrom man, is a model of the manner in which such mighty events taketheir place among the impressions of the more sincere and spontaneoustype of talent. The topic takes its pre-eminence by intensity and not byspace, or even in a sense by design. Indeed it is best expressed in ametaphor used by the writer herself about the topic itself; the metaphorof the colour red in its relation to other colours. Red rivets the eye,not by quantity but by quality; and in any picture or pattern a spot orstreak of it will make itself the feature or the key. Miss SibylBristowe's poem conceives the Creator confronted as with a brokenspectrum or a gap in coloured glass; feeling the whole range of visionto be dim and impoverished and adding, by the authority of His ownmysterious art, the dreadful colour of martyrdom.
Indeed the point of the comparison might very well be conveyed by thetwo poems about a London garden; that on the garden in peace beingcomparatively long, and that about the garden in war exceedingly short;short but sharply pathetic with its notion of peering and probing forthe microscope flowers that must be a part of the most utilitarianvegetables. Indeed the short poems are certainly the most successful;and there is the same brevity in the last line of the poem about thetragic passage of time; "If lips of children had not told me so." Thesame general impression, as in the comparison already noted, isconveyed, for instance, in[Pg 9] the fact that the poems about South Africaare private rather t