POETRY AND PRISON

(Pall Mall Gazette, January 3, 1889.)

Prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet.  The Love Sonnets of Proteus, in spite of their clever Musset-like modernities and their swift brilliant wit, were but affected or fantastic at best.  They were simply the records of passing moods and moments, of which some were sad and others sweet, and not a few shameful.  Their subject was not of high or serious import.  They contained much that was wilful and weak.  In Vinculis, upon the other hand, is a book that stirs one by its fine sincerity of purpose, its lofty and impassioned thought, its depth and ardour of intense feeling.  ‘Imprisonment,’ says Mr. Blunt in his preface, ’is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence.  Like a sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul emerges from it stronger and more self-contained.’  To him, certainly, it has been a mode of purification.  The opening sonnets, composed in the bleak cell of Galway Gaol, and written down on the fly-leaves of the prisoner’s prayer-book, are full of things nobly conceived and nobly uttered, and show that though Mr. Balfour may enforce ‘plain living’ by his prison regulations, he cannot prevent ‘high thinking’ or in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man’s soul.  They are, of course, intensely personal in expression.  They could not fail to be so.  But the personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it.  The petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be found here.  In its place we have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame-like passion.  Such a sonnet as the following comes out of the very fire of heart and brain: 

   God knows, ’twas not with a fore-reasoned plan
      I left the easeful dwellings of my peace,
   And sought this combat with ungodly Man,
      And ceaseless still through years that do not cease
      Have warred with Powers and Principalities. 
   My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began,
      Was as a sister diligent to please
   And loving all, and most the human clan.

   God knows it.  And He knows how the world’s tears
      Touched me.  And He is witness of my wrath,
   How it was kindled against murderers
      Who slew for gold, and how upon their path
   I met them.  Since which day the World in arms
   Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.

And this sonnet has all the strange strength of that despair which is but the prelude to a larger hope: 

   I thought to do a deed of chivalry,
      An act of worth, which haply in her sight
   Who was my mistress should recorded be
      And of the nations.  And, when thus the fight
      Faltered and men once bold with faces white
   Turned this and that way in excuse to flee,
      I only stood, and by the foeman’s might
   Was overborne and mangled cruelly.