The Old Time World

And poems of Old Time religion

Pansies: A Book of Poems by May Probyn

The medieval revival, Victorian gothic — these things did not pass May Probyn by. I won’t exaggerate: she was not Walter Scott. But she did not quite wish to be. Her poetry is about young, arrogant lords and fair ladies doomed to die. And there is, I fear, so often in the background the headsman and his axe. I’m sure, although it is not often referenced, that all the fair ladies are wearing fine, silken gowns of many vivid colours. And they clasp roses in their hands, and posies to their faces, when the narrative demands it. A world of great brightness, drawn in clean lines.

This is a romantic world. But it is also a cruel world. A world of immense punishment for transgression. A world where a young son, passionately attached to his family honour, would knife his own sister, just below her heart, as she travels off out of the family lands and from the family house, to be wed to one the young man considers sinful or unworthy. And this is a world where those who are condemned to die (for what is a medieval fantastique without those kinds of threats prevailing?) gather their rosebuds while they may, and live lives of chaste immediacy, scarce caring for the morrow.

Some might call this kind of poetry naive. I’d be tempted to. I’d be tempted to call Probyn’s obsessive harking back to the good old religion (she was a Catholic convert) naive, too. Ever lunging for the rosary beads, ever condemning Eve for her sins, and praising Mary for giving us our Saviour, immaculately doing her own necessary work to obviate all sins. I would call that naive; but for all that, it seems appropriate. It seems to fit. It works.

First of all, there is something tempering the simple faith and honest country goodness that this collection prompts. And that is real fear.

The fear of the knife and of the early death and of the pointless, wasted life. The life rather like the stalk of wheat before the scythe: cut down at its height and splendour for reasons external, unknown.

And the real fear of the seemingly sinful man dying without giving his confession. Even if the attached tale — of a priest, aided by a menial, who narrates the poem, charging into the inclement night to perform extreme unction — is a little much. (Naturally, this is set in the period when Catholic priests were legally persecuted in England. A very romantic, a very gothic, time.)

And the same real fear is buttressed by real sincerity.

I’ve no doubt that, for Probyn at least, it was all sincere. All of this religion. All of this lamentation and, not long after it, the seemingly histrionic joy. I’m not suggesting, nor have I evidence, that unlike many Catholic converts of our own day and age, this was all a pose for her. All an aesthetic. An excuse to dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and to make some money. Probyn seems totally sincere. And that, perhaps even oddly, makes her aestheticism (the aesthetics of her faith) seem gripping. It makes the poetry seem greater than its somewhat childish manner. It makes it seem as though it counts.

What kinds of thing do I mean? I mean the ballads and the ballades and the rondels about the love of the good Lord and so on. The quite trite little poems about heaven emptying out when one admitted sinner is held at the gate by St Peter, only for the big man himself to step in and to say that, since he cannot have a heaven without a choir, without a congregation, everyone ought to be permitted to come back in. The sinner being helped by St Joseph.

That kind of thing. None of it is Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven,’ which was published in the same decade and really gave some force to all those platitudes of the faithful. None of it is at all convincing if you’re not already in the club. But this is the kind of thing, one has to concede, that naive young people in the Olden Times may well have said to themselves as they ate apples on green, green grasses. As they enjoyed the pleasures of bolts of new-dyed cloth and repasts of simple fare and a little moderate drinking in Merrie England. As they loved their Lord and each other quite, quite deeply.

It’s an atmosphere. And I think it works.

A little now about Probyn’s verse. It’s correct. That is perhaps how best to put it. She sticks to her verse forms. Heroic couplets, a sonnet, and the aforementioned styles. And occasionally she doubles them up, announcing any modification in her titles.

Her lines do not mess about much with altered metres. They do as they are meant to do. One or two of her rhymes seem forced and somewhat weak. But most (the great happy majority) land with satisfaction. The reader is never bored. And although rhythmic accuracy can lull one almost to sleep, it never does here. Even if one has heard from Scott and from others the stories of young men and women in the beforetimes, their romances and their dooms, this does not detract from those tales or fail to live up to them.

These stories of a gone and Olden Time.