Volume 25, Number 12 · July 20, 1978
Let There Be Light
By F.W. Bateson
The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse
chosen and edited by Kingsley Amis
Oxford University Press, 347 pp., $13.95
When T.S. Eliot found himself with, for whatever reason, time to kill—waiting for a train, for example—it was his habit to repeat to himself, as far as his memory allowed him to reconstruct them, certain favorite poems. It was a very miscellaneous list, this private anthology of Elliot's. It included, for example, 'Danny Deever,' the best probably of Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads, but as Eliot has acknowledged in his prefatory essay to his selection from Kipling's verse nothing Kipling wrote was quite poetry in the ordinary sense of the word. John Davidson's 'Thirty Bob a Week' was an even more unexpected item to find Eliot reconstructing in a station waitingroom. It is quite a long poem with few striking phrases and the order in which the stanzas occur is—or seems to be—decidedly haphazard. Campion's 'Rose-cheeked Laura, come' was another of Eliot's time-killers. Its unusual combination of trochees and spondees had been used by Campion to demonstrate one of the ways a classical meter could be used accentually in English; no doubt the challenge it presented to Eliot's prosodic interests made it worth his retaining or recovering, though it has also, of course, a genuine if minimal lyric quality.
Review, 1998 words
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