Double Identity

Though this book contains several excellent poems, one questions the judgment of Capricorn Press in allowing an uneven selection, undistinguished setting-out, and most inappropriate cover design to pass muster. This poet has been badly served by his publishers. No cover design would have been better than the robust gentleman with a pipe who ‘muses’ and looks at a child’s outline of trees and ranges. Some judicious weeding-out of poems would have been of great benefit. As the selection stands, the gap between Mr Hardie’s best work and his worst is so great that one is tempted to suppose a case of double identity. The following lines come from the beginning of his poem ‘East Wind’ –

I lay awake and listened to the uneasy wind.
East wind, uncertain, impatient for the day,
Stumbling blindly over gable ends,
Seeking the fugitive light,
The lost beacon.

Where is the assuring light? . . .

One experiences fraternal envy on reading these lines. The east wind is a wind of the soul. But then, on the next page of the book –

page 392

Heigh-ho, here I go
Down the tinkling row
Where the rhyme bells grow,
Without heed, without care,
And I know not where . . .

We have heard these bells before. They ring only in the flaccid conceits of Georgian poetry. We have endured this plague for over fifty years. It requires its devotees to write as if they were imbeciles, unpleasant imbeciles – ‘girlish, giggling and gaunt,’ as Mr Hardie so accurately, if unconsciously, defines ‘this rhyme-stupid garden’. He has no need of it; for he can write like a born poet –

Dream harvest of another sphere,
Bound close within the heart,
I reap in longing loneliness,
Lost worlds, while love is near;
Speak now that I may hear,
And know the space between
This world where kings are crowned,
And the low sea sounds . . .

This true vein rarely lasts for the length of a poem. But if Mr Hardie were to set aside all notion of poetry as an eccentric self-indulgence, he could write most forcibly and well.

1959 (196)