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    Provocations
    Provocations
    Provocations
    Ebook93 pages45 minutes

    Provocations

    By Sibyl Bristowe

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    Provocations

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      Book preview

      Provocations - Sibyl Bristowe

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Provocations, by Sibyl Bristowe

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Provocations

      Author: Sibyl Bristowe

      Release Date: October 12, 2010 [EBook #33855]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROVOCATIONS ***

      Produced by Bryan Ness, Iris Schimandle and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This

      file was produced from images generously made available

      by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

      PROVOCATIONS

      TO THE MEMORY

      OF

      MY FATHER

      JOHN SYER BRISTOWE, M.D., F.R.S., LL.D.

      THIS LITTLE BOOK

      OF VERSE

      IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

      PROVOCATIONS

      BY

      SIBYL BRISTOWE

      WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

      G. K. CHESTERTON

      LONDON, W.C. 1

      ERSKINE MACDONALD, LTD.

      All Rights Reserved.

      Copyright by Erskine MacDonald, Ltd.

      in the United States of America.

      First published October, 1918

      INTRODUCTION

      The verses in this volume cover very many and various occasions; and are therefore the very contrary of what is commonly called occasional verse. The term is used with a meaning that is very mutable; or with a meaning that has been greatly distorted and degraded. Occasion should mean opportunity; and in the case of poetry it should rather mean provocation. And the trick of writing upon what are called public occasions, instead of upon what may truly be described as private provocations, has been responsible for much verse which is not only insufficient but insincere. It has produced not only many bad poems; but what is perhaps worse, many bad poems from many good poets. The sincerity of Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poetry is perhaps most clearly proved by the number of points at which it touches life; and the spontaneity, or even suddenness, with which they are touched. It is an occasional verse which arises out of real occasions, and not out of merely fictitious or even merely formal ones. Thus while the one or two poems on the great war are probably the best, they are by no means the biggest; they are not the most arresting in the sense of being the most ambitious. They are arresting because the great war really is great, and moves an imaginative spirit to great issues; it is public but it is very far from being official. The war, indeed, is necessarily more important as a private event even than as a public event. And the few but fine lines, on a brother fallen in a fight amid wild river that sundered man from man, is a model of the manner in which such mighty events take their place among the impressions of the more sincere and spontaneous type of talent. The topic takes its pre-eminence by intensity and not by space, or even in a sense by design. Indeed it is best expressed in a metaphor used by the writer herself about the topic itself; the metaphor of the colour red in its relation to other colours. Red rivets the eye, not by quantity but by quality; and in any picture or pattern a spot or streak of it will make itself the feature or the key. Miss Sibyl Bristowe's poem conceives the Creator confronted as with a broken spectrum or a gap in coloured glass; feeling the whole range of vision to be dim and impoverished and adding, by the authority of His own mysterious art, the dreadful colour of martyrdom.

      Indeed the point of the comparison might very well be conveyed by the two poems about a London garden; that on the garden in peace being comparatively long, and that about the garden in war exceedingly short; short but sharply pathetic with its notion of peering and probing for the microscope flowers

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