Nature Poet

These are the collected works in verse of the best nature poet of our century. While other writers have pursued their themes of politics or romantic love, and recorded the disintegration of established human values, Andrew Young has followed his original bent, an able naturalist and a clergyman not orthodoxly clerical. Even less than his prose works do these poems make any show of private feeling. Whether he writes of a Highland cairn, a dead blackbird, or horses drinking from a stream, his view remains cautiously objective. But the poems, as neat and finished as those of Herrick, betray obliquely the quality of the mind that produced them; and the metaphysical realities of time and earth are reflected in every second image –

Sheep-fold, I thought – till by the dyke
I saw it lying deep in dock
And knew he never whistled tyke,
The herd who folded that quiet flock.

In this volume are many poems lucid, intense, and technically perfect, unparalleled even by a lyricist of the calibre of de la Mare. It is a bedside book, to be read and sampled over a lifetime, slowly and quietly as it was written; and the admirable wood engravings which illustrate the poems add considerably to its value and interest.

Andrew Young’s attitude to the natural world is near to that of son to mother. He grieves at perpetual evidence of tragedy and decay, yet these very factors accentuate his love. The comfort of the resurrection is little stressed, perhaps because for him the known world of birth and death seems the more suitable subject for poetry. In the verse play Nicodemus (here included), he extends his scope, and treats a biblical theme most effectively. But essentially his poetry is that of a solitary being moved to profound reflection by what meets the eye and ear.

1951 (46)