JOHN LUCASno anticipation: nothing but the torpor induced by despair. While it would
be unfair to suggest that all of Levy's poetry operates in this mode, it is
certainly the case that most of it does.
This despondent tone may be a matter of gender. Women probably found
London an even more alienating place to be than did most male poets. Ella
Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), for instance,
ends with its protagonist Mary Erie, a would-be writer, gazing down on
London at sunset: "Standing alone, there on the heights, she made a feint as
if to grasp the city spread out before her, but the movement ended in a vain
gesture, and the radiance of her face was blotted out as she began to plod
homewards in the twilight of the suburban road." 44 Bohemian women such
as Nancy Cunard, Nina Hammett, as well as a number of artists - including
Kathleen Hales, Evelyn Gibbs, and Elizabeth Vellacott - will erupt into
London nightlife two decades later. In the 1890s women more typically
returned home in the evening, although "home" might mean the bleak
solitariness of lodgings. But for male writers of the city during this decade,
the idiom was, as Fletcher observes, "nocturnal." And the night-time city, it
hardly needs saying, is a place released from and licensed to withstand the
bourgeois assumptions of what is "strenuous and virile."
As a consequence, some male poets identified with the energies of
women who themselves were released from bourgeois assumptions. Hence
Symons's "Nora on the Pavement," which celebrates a free spirit, "inno-
cently spendthrift of herself" (AS I, 83) (Since the first performance in
England in 1889 of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, "Nora" had become a
name synonymous with the rejection of conventional mores.) The poem
ends:
It is the soul of Nora,
Living at last, and giving forth to the night,
Bird-like, the burden of its own delight,
All its desire, and all the joy of living,
In that blithe madness in the soul of Nora. (AS I, 84)The poem comes from Symons's London Nights, published in 1896. Linda
Dowling remarks that Symons found "London charged with 'romance' not
least because it was the thrilling venue for his own sexual adventures; his
poetic speakers see London's 'villainous music-halls' and 'little rooms'
brimming with a special, if factitiously lurid glamour." 45 And she usefully
draws attention to his claim, made in 1892 in the course of a review of
Henley's poems, that the personal note in poetry - "personal romance, the
romance of oneself" 46 - provided a fresh subject for poets faced with the
exhaustion of traditional themes.
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