british poetry in the age of modernism

This heart, some fraction of me, happily

Floats through the window even now to a tree

‘The Wasp Trap’ is also about such unintended beauty in a jam-jar left
on a tree overnight. Intended for the unlovely task of killing wasps, in the
moonlight it is transformed:

Nothing on earth,

And in the heavens no star,

For pure brightness is worth

More than that jar,

For wasps meant, now

A star – long may it swing

From the dead apple-bough

So glistening.

The spoken sentence of the poem moves across the line divisions
quickly, varying between two and three stresses per line and eliding the
expected pause at the end of lines like ‘For wasps meant, now / A star’ and
‘For pure brightness is worth / More than that jar’. This makes it run
slightly contrary to the structure of the lines; if one reads that last stanza as
four clear lines of poetry, there is an accent on ‘worth’; as a sentence
naturally spoken, there is not. This mismatch between the poem’s own
rhyme and rhythm captures the glancing, accidental beauty of the jar, as
the rhyme doesn’t fall on the beat in the first stanza’s ‘lovelier’ / ‘meadows
were’, or only on one half of the rhyme in the second and fourth stanzas,
‘more / Lovely [.. .] before’ and ‘swing’ / ‘glistening’. This beautiful
moment can only appear in passing, for to expect it might spoil it: as he
says in ‘The Ash Grove’, ‘I had what most I desired, without search or
desert or cost’, in a moment which itself is always elsewhere:

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval –

Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles – but nothing at all,

Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,

Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.

And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring

The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost

With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,

And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,

But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die

And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.

82 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism