Posted by Kevin Belmonte in Literary History | 0 Comments
Red Booth Notes: The Poetry of Henry Kirke White & John Drinkwater’s Gift
The British writer John Drinkwater led a fascinating life. An accomplished poet and playwright, he once directed Sir Lawrence Olivier in his play Bird in Hand (produced in 1927).
As a literary critic, he published studies of Byron, Swinburne, and William Morris.[1] Lines like these display his poetic gift—lines that for me, always beckon to the Grey Havens of Tolkien’s mythic world:
Songs of the lake and wood
Of water and wind I have heard,
And I have understood
According to Thy word.
What then is now to learn?
Seaward, O soul, return.[2]
Many were the services to literature John Drinkwater rendered. But one among them is little known today, though it holds a moving and poignant story.
In 1907, Drinkwater’s edition of Poems, Letters and Prose Fragments of Kirke White was published. In his Introduction, Drinkwater stated: “For some forty years after his death, the poetry of Henry Kirke White enjoyed a very considerable popularity, and this during a period that was productive of a series of poets whose names must forever mark one of our most glorious epochs of verse. Great poets and critics combined with the cultured public of the day in lamenting White’s untimely death—not only for sentimental reasons—but because they believed a harvest of really considerable poetry had been lost to the world. Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth were agreed in this opinion. Byron, whose praise was not lightly given, had, even in his bitterest mood, nothing but admiration for the promise that was displayed in White’s work.”[3]
Byron paid homage to the young poet’s memory, and called him “noble heart.”[4] Lines like these flowed from White’s pen—
Now, as I rove, where wide the prospect grows,
A livelier light upon my vision flows.
No more above, the embracing branches meet;
No more the river gurgles at my feet,
But seen deep down the cliff’s impending side
Through hanging woods, now gleams its silver tide.
Dim is my upland path,—across the Green
Fantastic shadows fling, yet oft between
The chequer’d glooms, the moon her chaste ray sheds…[5]
Photo by Kevin Belmonte
Henry Kirke White had risen from obscurity, poverty and hardship to win high academic distinction at St. John’s College, Cambridge. But no sooner had he been chosen “first man of his year”[6] by his examiners, than his health, always precarious, broke. He died in October 1806, only a few months after his 21st birthday.
To mark the centenary of White’s death, John Drinkwater offered an appraisal of White’s verse that was, in its way, a gift. Though he had died young, Drinkwater rightly understood that White had been given time enough to pen lines that deserved to live—lines that should have a place in our living cultural memory. And so, as Drinkwater observed: “the predominant influence in White’s work is that of the pioneers of the Romantic revival. To this revival he made a small but definite contribution.”[7] Here followed two passages Drinkwater singled out for special praise, among them the verse given above, and four lines of a fragment I’ve always found hauntingly beautiful:
Lo! on the eastern summit, clad in grey,
Morn, like a horseman girt for travel, comes;
And from his tower of mist.
Night’s watchman hurries down.[8]
I’ve always believed it takes one poet to know another. Drinkwater was very just to acknowledge a kindred spirit in White, and to say this of the promise present in these lines. “They foreshadow,” Drinkwater wrote, “no matter how faintly, the great years that are to follow, and in the face of them, it is impossible to treat White as a negligible quantity in the movement that was to produce a Shelley and a Keats.”[9] Moreover, as Drinkwater knew, Keats remembered White in verse, and that says a great deal:
Or did ye stay to give a welcoming
To some lone spirits who could proudly sing
Their youth away, and die?[10]
I believe that every time a departed poet’s verse is read, they live again. Drinkwater’s gift was well given. Henry Kirke White’s voice should not be silent. As people of faith, or lovers of the written word, regardless of world-view, how can we not be drawn to a line like this, which harkens to the hope of heaven?
To realms of light, and pierce the radiance there.[1]
[1] A line of verse from page 285 of The Remains of Henry Kirke White, edited by Robert Southey, vol. 1, (London: Vernor, Hood and Sharpe, 1807).
To realms of light, and pierce the
[1] The biographical information concerning Drinkwater’s life and work is gleaned from Eric Salmon’s excellent essay in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
[2] Lines from the poem, “Nunc Dimittis,” given on page 156 of The Collected Poems of John Drinkwater, vol. 2, (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1923).
[3] From pages xxxiii-xxxiv of Poems, Letters and Prose Fragments of Kirke White, edited by John Drinkwater, (London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1907).
[4] Lord Byron, a line from the poem “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” which appears on page 35 of The Works of Lord Byron…, (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1828). This line appears among a portion of verse Byron penned in tribute to Henry Kirke White.
[5] Lines from the poem, “Clifton Grove,” given on page 14 of The Remains of Henry Kirke White, edited by Robert Southey, vol. 2, (London: Vernor, Hood and Sharpe, 1807).
[6] From page xxvii of Poems, Letters and Prose Fragments of Kirke White, edited by John Drinkwater, (London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1907).
[7] From page xlii of Poems, Letters and Prose Fragments of Kirke White, edited by John Drinkwater, (London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1907).
[8] Lines from a fragment of verse given on page 138 of The Remains of Henry Kirke White, edited by Robert Southey, vol. 2, (London: Vernor, Hood and Sharpe, 1807).
[9] From page xlii of Poems, Letters and Prose Fragments of Kirke White, edited by John Drinkwater, (London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1907).
[10] lines 217-219 of the poem “Sleep and Poetry,” from The Poetical Works of John Keats (1884). Of these, literary scholar John Barnard has written: “Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse believed that Henry Kirke White was one of the ‘lone spirits’ commemorated in ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (ll. 218-219) who ‘proudly sing|Their youth away and die’. See John Barnard, “Keats Echoes Kirke White,” an article in The Review of English Studies, new series, vol. 47, No. 187 (August 1996), pp. 389-393. Published by Oxford University Press.
