Georgian poetry, 1920-22 — Story, Setting & Ideas

Cricket as a Lens for Memory

In William Kerr's 'Past and Present,' the poet invokes the names of famous cricketers—Nyren, Hambledon, Mynn, Fuller Pilch, Colin Blythe—to anchor a meditation on time and memory. The diction is precise and historically specific: 'Daisies are over Nyren, and Hambledon / Hardly remembers any summer gone.' The choice of cricket, a sport associated with pastoral English summers, allows Kerr to contrast the living presence of George Hirst ('not yet a ghost, substantial') with the spectral figures of the past. The description of Hirst's strokes—'off-drives mellow as brown ale, and crisp / Merry late cuts'—uses simile drawn from everyday pleasures, grounding the athletic in the domestic. This blend of elegy and immediacy is a deliberate authorial strategy: the poem refuses to let the past remain abstract, instead populating it with named individuals and specific actions.

Rural Detail and the Work of Description

Several poets in the anthology share a commitment to rendering rural life with exactness. In 'The Apple Tree,' Kerr compares a beloved to an apple tree, then adds 'Mary and Margaret playing under the branches, / And everywhere soft shadows like your eyes.' The naming of the girls and the specific image of scattered blossom create a scene that is both personal and archetypal. Similarly, in 'The Audit,' the poet uses the lilies that 'take thought for many things'—a twist on the biblical injunction—to introduce the pressures of daily existence: 'Mary must drudge like Martha, dainty Ruth / Forget the morning music in the corn.' The biblical allusions are woven into a fabric of rural labor, where even the most delicate figures are subject to the demands of the season. This descriptive strategy avoids sentimentality by insisting on the physicality of work and the passage of time.

Dialogue and Direct Address

Richard Hughes's 'Poets, Painters, Puddings' is a standout for its use of direct address and colloquial rhythm. The poem opens with a series of imperatives: 'spit you / On words: then admit you / To heaven or hell / By the tales that they tell.' The speaker adopts a mock-commanding tone, grouping poets, painters, and puddings as equal subjects of celebration. The diction is deliberately low—'jolly mugs,' 'curse you with oaths,' 'tear holes in your clothes'—and the meter shifts between anapestic and iambic, giving the poem a rollicking, almost nursery-rhyme quality. This choice contrasts sharply with the more solemn registers of Kerr or Blunden, suggesting that Marsh valued variety in voice. The poem's final lines, 'Poets, painters, and puddings; these three / Crown the day as it crowned should be,' use a deliberately awkward syntax to reinforce the playful, anti-hierarchical stance.

Formal Variation and the Lyric Tradition

The anthology displays a range of formal choices, from sonnets to free verse. William Kerr's 'The Audit' is a Shakespearean sonnet, its argument structured by the turn at line 9: 'Though song be hollow and no dreams come true, / Still songs and dreams are better than the truth.' The rhyme scheme and meter are conventional, but the content—a meditation on the cost of living—gives the form a philosophical weight. In contrast, 'Counting Sheep' by the same poet uses a looser, more conversational line: 'Half-awake I walked / A dimly-seen sweet hawthorn lane / Until sleep came.' The enjambment and the casual 'I' create a dreamlike quality that the sonnet's tight structure would resist. This formal variety is not merely decorative; it reflects different modes of attention—the sonnet for argument, the free-verse lyric for reverie. Marsh's selection thus highlights how form shapes meaning, even within a single poet's work.

Readers approaching Georgian Poetry, 1920-22 will find a collection that rewards attention to the poets' craft. The excerpts suggest that Marsh favored poems where diction and description do not merely ornament but carry the weight of reflection. Whether through the precise naming of a cricket stroke or the colloquial address of a fellow artist, these poets share a commitment to making the familiar strange and the specific universal. The anthology invites comparison across its contributors, revealing how a common interest in rural life and memory can yield strikingly different voices.

There’s a particular hush in Marsh’s 1922 preface, a carefulness about choosing just the right word. Years later, I found that same quiet attention waiting in Poems — Context and Discussion, as if it remembered the older book’s whispers about diction and landscape, and chose simply to sit beside them, sharing the silence.