BOOK REVIEW A SELECTION OF POEMS by
(Published
FRANCIS
by Norman
ENGLEHEART
Adlard
& Co., Ipswich,
at
18I-)
SIR Francis Meynell in his Foreword describes " Francis Engleheart as emphatically a ' Nature' p o e t " ; but that is not to say he wrote pretty, pretty, sentimental verse. No, he was a distinguished poet, perhaps a great poet— philosophy, religion, great scholarship combine vvith his intimate Observation of Nature. Even a delightful tiny lyric about a wren has this quality. A longer " Ecstasy of Birds " evokes our pleasure in assemblages of rooks, daws, starlings—" a co-ordinated wilderness of wings, the laughter of tatterdermalion birds " . It is the Geologist who writes of " a charging river " and asks " what graver carved this alcove from the gneiss ? What adamant cohesion veined and combed, Hardened these walls that yet in crannied slabs Burst into fronds and flowers for our delight ? " " Water flings itself in emerald slides, Slips sideways down a cleft and hurls itself, Shouting into the bubble and seeth and snow, Swirled in a gyre of pot-holes, Sluicing out Sponge moss and glacier and a thousand springs. Of these for us what preparation from how long ago ? " (This is Norway). T h e scholar peeps out continually in words that send some of us to dictionary or lexicon, but never an ugly or clumsy word— the choice is of a poet's with ear for sound and metre. " T h e breakers—flooding up the shingle, and then a murmuring sibilance increases, Swells exuberant inspissated hiss—Pother of cannoning pebbles cavorting into green glass wall of the next encounter— T h e systole-diastole of stranded water " . T h e Philospher : " All things shall fade to nothing there, but nothing cannot be. There is no room for nothing in the All." " How nai'vely it is said ' He whom I loved is dead '. For what I loved is not a thing that dies—All that was lovely I S . " " T h e Empty Grave." This historian teils us in words of Anglo-Saxon derivation that the tumulus contained a boat but no body. For Anna, King of East Anglia was a Christian and with his son, both killed in battle with Mercians near Blythburgh was given Christian burial there. His pagan brother gave his boat and all his rieh silver vessels honoured pagan burial without the body. There is a fine description of the hauling up under the sheer Sutton Hill of the boat from her moorings in the river. J.C.N.W.