SOURCE: "The Poetry," in Hilaire Belloc, Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 24-53.

[In the following essay, Markel discusses the defining characteristics of Belloc's poetry.]

During a writing career of more than forty-five years, Hilaire Belloc turned out almost one hundred and fifty prose works. With only a handful of exceptions, writing these books was an enormous chore for him, what one commentator calls his "sad campaign for a livelihood." Belloc's aggressive and domineering personality prevented him from long remaining anyone's employee, so he turned his antipathy for socialists, atheists, and Darwinians into a lifelong vocation.

But Belloc's real love remained his poetry. What he wished to be remembered for is collected in a slim volume called Complete Verse. Had circumstances been otherwise, he probably would have written ten volumes of poetry and very little else. Whereas the subject of his prose was the struggle of men in the world, their attempt to create a set of reasonable and just institutions that would allow them to lead civilized lives, the subject of his poetry was the perennial theme of man's struggle against his mortality. Belloc put into prose what he wanted the world to hear; he saved for his poetry what he had to say.

In addition to his serious poetry, Belloc wrote several books of light verse, most of which is collected today under the title Cautionary Verses. His first book of light verse, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, appeared the same year as his first collection of serious poems and, much to his delight, sold briskly. Then twenty-six years old, and with a family, a prestigious First Honours in History from Oxford, and no prospects for a job, Belloc decided the serious poems would have to wait, at least for a while.

The Light Verse

The nineteenth century in England was the great period of light verse, or what is sometimes called nonsense verse. Perhaps as a reaction to the seriousness and solemnity of Victorian advice-books for children, the writers of light verse portrayed a world in which children, unencumbered by the restrictions of "civilized" behavior, romped freely through a world bounded only by their own imaginations. The two most famous writers of light verse were Edward Lear (1812-1888) and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), who is known today as Lewis Carroll.

Lear, a landscape painter by profession, popularized the short verse form known as the limerick:

Lewis Carroll, a minor church official and mathematics professor at Oxford, wrote mathematics books under his real name and children's books under his pseudonym. Best remembered today as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Carroll is known for his creation of nonsense words in the poems contained within the two famous books. "Jabberwocky," in Through The Looking-Glass, is the prime example:

Although Belloc is often linked with Lear and Carroll as the third master of nonsense verse, he seems to have been largely indifferent to both of them. The limerick form appears in several of Belloc's letters to friends—he could apparently toss them off effortlessly—but it doesn't appear in any of his published verse. And Belloc seems to have been even less impressed by Carroll's nonsense verse. In fact, he was almost alone among his countrymen in not thinking Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a masterpiece. He described it as full of "the humour which is founded upon folly" and thus worthwhile but inferior to "the wit that is founded upon wisdom." He went on to predict—wildly incorrectly, as it has turned out—that the fame of Alice would not outlive the insular and protected garden of the Victorian period.

Belloc remained unmoved by Lear and Carroll because he was not principally interested in writing for children. Even though the titles of his light verse collections—such as The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and More Beasts (for Worse Children)—appear at first glance to be intended for children, the adjectives "bad" and "worse" clearly suggest an adult perspective. Unlike Lear and Carroll, Belloc never tried to assume the viewpoint of the child, and there is very little childlike delight in any of the cautionary tales. Instead, Belloc wrote from the perspective of the stern parent lecturing children on the ghastly consequences of their improper behavior. Belloc achieved his humor by overstating the perils. Most of the bad children in his books die a horrible death: several are eaten by wild animals, one dies in an explosion caused in part by his own carelessness, and another succumbs because he ate too much string. Those lucky children who do not die suffer other unkind fates. Maria, for instance, constantly made funny faces. One day, "Her features took their final mould / In shapes that made your blood run cold …" Her sad story is suggested by the title of the poem: "Maria Who Made Faces and a Deplorable Marriage." Unlike Lear and Carroll, whose strategy was to bridge the gulf between adults and children, Belloc startled his readers by exaggerating that gulf. Belloc's view of children did not look backward to the Victorian nonsense poets, but forward to the films of W. C. Fields.

The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896) was the first appearance of Belloc's irascible narrator, who innocently announces his intentions in an introduction:

But the real personality of the narrator soon emerges. In "The Lion" he warns little children to beware:

The Lion, the Lion, he dwells in the waste,
He has a big head and a very small waist;
But his shoulders are stark, and his jaws they are grim,
And a good little child will not play with him.

The next poem is "The Tiger":

The Tiger on the other hand, is kittenish and mild,
He makes a pretty playfellow for any little child;
And mothers of large families (who claim to common sense)
Will find a Tiger well repay the trouble and expense.

Enhancing Belloc's humor are the drawings by his friend Basil T. Blackwood that accompany the text. "The Lion" is printed around a sketch of a terrified child gazing at the ferocious animal rearing on its hind legs before him. "The Tiger" has two sketches: in the first, a hungry-looking tiger is approaching a smiling toddler. In the second, the tiger is walking away, licking its lips. This was one of Belloc's strategies in the book: the words express the seemingly innocent advice; the drawings portray the narrator's—and the reader's—real thoughts.

This kind of macabre humor obviously is not intended for the average child. The parents are the real audience, as several other verses in the collection make clear. "The Marmozet" and "The Big Baboon" gave Belloc a chance to have a little fun with the evolutionists, with whom he was constantly quarreling, while satirizing the poverty of the modern spirit. The drawing accompanying "The Marmozet" shows three figures: a statue of a burly caveman wearing an animal pelt and carrying a club, an anemic-looking young man perspiring as he pedals his bicycle, and a marmozet casting a scornful eye on the young man.

The four-line poem makes the point:

"The Big Baboon" focuses Belloc's satire a little more:

The drawings that go with this poem show a happy baboon in the wild, a baboon gazing at a pretentiously dressed African, a baboon gazing into a mirror while his valet helps him on with his coat, and finally several baboons walking happily down a city street, outfitted with luxurious overcoats, fashionable hats, and canes.

Some of the verses in The Bad Child's Book of Beasts are funny without being violent or satirical, and many of the drawings are innocently clever, but for the most part Belloc was writing in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, not Lear and Carroll. Belloc chose animals for his subject not because every child likes to read about them, but because they are strong, self-sufficient, and unaffected. Belloc accepted them as creatures that know what they are, never aspire to be anything else, and never are needlessly cruel. In this way they serve as a perfect contrast to the foolish and vain species called Man. Belloc's book of nonsense verse, reminiscent of Swift's parable of the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms in Part IV of Gulliver's Travels, turns the hierarchy of nature upside down. Published in Oxford, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts sold out in four days. A second printing began immediately, and the author arranged for publication in the United States. The critics were very enthusiastic, but, as biographer Speaight remarks, they usually failed to see that the comic verse was not really nonsense.

The critics also applauded More Beasts (for Worse Children) (1897), which Belloc published quickly to capitalize on the success of the earlier book. Its plan is the same, but on the whole the humor is forced. Several of the verses are clever. "The Microbe," for example, pokes fun at scientists who describe fantastic microscopic organisms they have never seen. "Oh! let us never, never doubt / What nobody is sure about!" intones the narrator solemnly. But the violence and cruelty of many of the verses is gratuitous: the woman who is devoured by a python in this book "died, because she never knew / Those simple little rules and few" about how to care for it. Her fate is neither humorous nor revealing.

Belloc found his mark again the next year with The Modern Traveller (1898), a satirical parable about imperialism. His criticism of the British role in the struggle with the Boers in South Africa was already taking shape; despite its clever verse and Blackwood's drawings, The Modern Traveller was obviously intended for adults, not children.

The poem describes how the narrator and two friends—Commander Sin and Captain Blood—travel to Africa to establish the Libyan Association "whose purpose is to combine 'Profit and Piety.'" Recently returned from Africa and looking over the page proofs of his memoirs, the narrator invites a reporter from the Daily Menace over for an exclusive article on his expedition. The explorer has plenty of pencils ready for the reporter, because the story is going to be a long one,

Of how we struggled to the coast,
And lost our ammunition;
How we retreated, side by side;
And how, like Englishmen, we died.

He begins by introducing Henry Sin:

In short, he was "A man Bohemian as could be— / But really vicious? Oh, no!" The other hero of the expedition, William Blood, while equally unsavory, was more at home in the modern world. He was:

A sort of modern Buccaneer,
Commercial and refined.
Like all great men, his chief affairs
Were buying stocks and selling shares.
He occupied his mind
In buying them by day from men
Who needed ready cash, and then
At evening selling them again
To those with whom he dined.

When the narrator and his two partners arrive in Africa, they enlist an accomplice, the Lord Chief Justice of Liberia, who gives them "good advice / Concerning Labour and its Price":

"In dealing wid de Native Scum,
Yo' cannot pick an' choose;
Yo' hab to promise um a sum
Ob wages, paid in Cloth and Rum.
But, Lordy! that's a ruse!
Yo' get yo' well on de Adventure,
And change de wages to Indenture."

A brief mutiny results—"We shot and hanged a few, and then / The rest became devoted men"—but soon the three adventurers find the land they wish to develop. The narrator describes Blood's triumphant pose:

Beneath his feet there stank
A swamp immeasurably wide,
Wherein a kind of fœtid tide
Rose rhythmical and sank,
Brackish and pestilent with weeds
And absolutely useless reeds …

…..

With arms that welcome and rejoice,
We heard him gasping, in a voice
By strong emotion rendered harsh:
"That Marsh—that Admirable Marsh!"

The Tears of Avarice that rise
In purely visionary eyes
Were rolling down his nose.

The development of Eldorado, as Blood christens it, is thwarted. After a confrontation with an international commission against imperialism, which concludes that they are too mad to cause any harm, the three are finally captured by a native tribe. Captain Blood is chopped up and sold by the slice ("Well, every man has got his price") and Commander Sin finds himself floating in a large kettle ("My dear companion making soup"). The narrator endures so well under incredible torture that the tribesmen finally decide he must be a god and release him. His final words to the reporter are that Sin and Blood "Would swear to all that I have said, / Were they alive; / but they are dead!"

The Modern Traveller, like Belloc's two previous books of light verse, was very popular with the public, but it received some unenthusiastic reviews in newspapers, probably because of the satirical portrait of The Daily Menace. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch explained the critical reaction by noting the link between the newspapers and imperialism: since the newspapers had been championing the cause of imperialism, they could not be expected to review fairly a book that criticizes it. The outbreak of the Boer War was in fact the most revealing comment on the book. Belloc in The Modern Traveller had shown that light verse could be the vehicle for serious satire without losing its popular appeal.

Belloc appreciated Quiller-Couch's praise, but his financial situation left him no leisure to savor it. Most of his time was being devoted to his first serious prose work, a full-length biography of the French Revolutionary figure Danton that could not hope to bring in much. So Belloc wrote A Moral Alphabet (1899). The alphabet format, in which each letter introduces a short verse, gave him a ready-made structure for verses on various subjects; unlike the Beast collections or The Modern Traveller, an alphabet book needs no unifying theme.

Signs of hasty composition are apparent in A Moral Alphabet, but the book is interesting in that it reveals Belloc's awareness of his audience and his growing self-confidence. Four of the twenty-six rhymes refer directly to this or one of his other books. "A," for instance, "stands for Archibald who told no lies, / And got this lovely volume for a prize." When he comes to the nemesis of all alphabet rhymsters, X, Belloc effortlessly turns the situation to his advantage:

No reasonable little Child expects
A Grown-up Man to make a rhyme on X.

     MORAL
These verses teach a clever child to find
Excuse for doing all that he's inclined.

A Moral Alphabet marks the end of the first phase of Belloc's professional literary career. With the coming of the new century he turned to more substantial formats; he had already proven himself a reigning master of comic verse in English. Between 1900 and 1905 he produced, among other works, a second biography, two prose satires, a book of literary criticism, a translation, a novel, and several travel books.

In 1907 Hilaire Belloc, member of Parliament, must have sensed that the public was ready for another book of light verse. Cautionary Tales for Children follows in the tradition of his first Beast book, but it shows a new direction in Belloc's thinking. Almost all of the children in this collection who pay so dearly for their misdeeds belong to the upper class. The title of one verse, "Godolphin Horne, Who was cursed with the Sin of Pride, and Became a Boot-Black," is representative of Belloc's new interest in satirizing the rigid class system of England. His characteristic mask in this book is that of the defender of the class system, but occasionally the real author peeks out and winks at his readers. One example is "Algernon, Who played with a Loaded Gun, and, on missing his Sister, was reprimanded by his Father." The most subtle verse is the final one, "Charles Augustus Fortescue, Who always Did what was Right, and so accumulated an Immense Fortune." Here Belloc takes particular advantage of Blackwood's drawings by making one statement with words and another with pictures. The verse describes how this perfect child sailed through life successfully,

And long before his Fortieth Year
Had wedded Fifi, Only Child
Of Bunyan, First Lord Aberfylde.
He thus became immensely Rich,
And built the Splendid Mansion which
Is called "The Cedars, Muswell Hill,"
Where he resides in Affluence still,
To show what Everybody might
Become by SIMPLY DOING RIGHT.

The drawing accompanying this idyllic tale, however, shows the groom with a slightly pained expression on his face as he gazes at his decidedly unattractive bride, Fifi. Thus, Belloc's final suggestion for the best way to punish the indolent rich of England is simply to let them go about their own business unmolested. Cautionary Tales for Children was successful in part because a popular singer, Clara Butt, performed the verses in concert throughout England.

Belloc's unorthodox parliamentary career kept him in the public eye. Frequently squabbling with his own party, he became known as something of a national eccentric, with a reputation apart from his literary renown. Just as nobody was surprised when he decided not to stand for reelection in 1910, nobody was surprised when in 1911 he published More Peers, a collection of cautionary verses for adults. One verse describes the unfortunate plight of a physician whose patient, a Lord Roehampton, dies without leaving enough to pay the medical fee. The furious doctor storms away when he learns this tragic news, "And ever since, as I am told, / Gets it beforehand; and in gold." Another lord, Henry Chase, wins a libel suit against The Daily Howl, "But, as the damages were small, / He gave them to a Hospital."

A Lord Finchley learns that excessive thrift has its penalties:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

The highlight of More Peers is a story that never gets told:

Lord Heygate had a troubled face,
His furniture was commonplace—
The sort of Peer who well might pass
For someone of the middle class.
I do not think you want to hear
About this unimportant Peer,
So let us leave him to discourse
About Lord Epsom and his horse.

Nineteen years were to pass before Belloc got around to New Cautionary Tales (1930), published near the end of his long career. This collection is tired, partly because Belloc was then sixty years old, but mostly because he feared that the good fight against the forces of privilege had been lost. He could not escape the realization that fifty years of struggle and one hundred and fifty books had not changed the world. One verse tells the story of how young John loses his inheritance when he tosses a stone that hits his wealthy uncle William. The old man calls to his nurse, Miss Charming,

"Go, get my Ink-pot and my Quill,
My Blotter and my Famous Will."
Miss Charming flew as though on wings
To fetch these necessary things,
And Uncle William ran his pen
Through "well-beloved John," and then
Proceeded, in the place of same,
To substitute Miss Charming's name:
Who now resides in Portman Square
And is accepted everywhere.

Belloc's last book of comic verse, Ladies and Gentlemen, was published two years later, in 1932. It was quite obviously the work of a weary man who no longer felt that the foibles of society were a thoroughly suitable subject for humorous verse. "The Garden Party," the opening verse, describes an affair attended by "the Rich," "the Poor," and "the People in Between":

For the hoary social curse
Gets hoarier and hoarier,
And it stinks a trifle worse
Than in the days of Queen Victoria…

The verse concludes with a reference to the fate of an earlier corrupt civilization: "And the flood destroyed them all." The final verse in the collection, "The Example," is a parable of two modern types. The man is a miserable agnostic whose only joy is to read the books written by the prophets of doom. The woman leads a life of mindless intemperance:

The Christians, a declining band,
Would point with monitory hand
To Henderson his desperation,
To Mary Lunn her dissipation,
And often mutter, "Mark my words!
Something will happen to those birds!"

Mary Lunn dies, "not before / Becoming an appalling bore," and Henderson is "suffering from paralysis." "The moral is (it is indeed) / You mustn't monkey with the Creed." Appropriately enough, Belloc's last book of comic verse concludes with a deadly serious joke.

The comic verse, except for The Modern Traveller, was collected under the title Cautionary Verses in 1940. The critical reception was highly enthusiastic. The New Yorker, for example, called Cautionary Verses "a grand omnibus." The collection remains Belloc's most popular single volume. An ironic reminder of the extent to which the satirical element in Belloc's comic verse has remained unrecognized is the fact that Cautionary Verses is generally catalogued among the children's books in the library. Taken together, the comic verse is a remarkable achievement. Belloc wrote too much of it, as he did of everything, but the best represents the extraordinary diversity of his imagination, which could combine pure nonsense of the highest quality and serious political and social satire. Perhaps the best insight into the origins of the comic verse is provided by Belloc himself in a poem he originally published in 1910 but which serves as an epigraph to Cautionary Verses. The poem, which begins "Child! do not throw this book about," ends with this stanza:

The comic verse is of course very funny, but behind the laughter is the sadness of an idealistic man in a real world.

The Serious Verse

In one of his comic verses Belloc wrote a couplet, "Upon the mansion's ample door, / To which he wades through heaps of Straw…" and added a footnote: "This is the first and only time / That I have used this sort of Rhyme." In his comic verse he was scrupulous about following the technical conventions, including such matters as the crispness of the end rhymes. He once wrote that comic verse "has nothing to sustain it save its own excellence of construction,… those who have attempted it [find] that no kind of verse needs more the careful and repeated attention of the artificer." This is surely overstatement, for the rate at which he produced his comic verse would have made such refinement and polishing impossible. However, the remark suggests the importance Belloc placed on "the excellence of construction" in all of his verse.

In his relatively few serious poems, in particular, he allowed himself the luxury of slow and careful construction, for in no other kind of writing would he speak so candidly. Almost everything else he wrote was intended to pay the bills. But in his serious poems he expressed his essence, the melancholy and even the despair that tested his Catholic faith. While the rest of Belloc's massive output contains the record of his many opinions, the serious poetry is his purest literary expression.

Belloc's poetic principles were classical. He deplored the contemporary trends in poetry whose origins he saw in the tenets of the Romantics of a century earlier. He insisted that "the greatest verse does not proceed immediately from the strongest feeling. The greatest verse calls up the strongest emotion in the reader, but in the writer it is a distillation, not a cry."

Thus, Belloc dispensed with Wordsworth's theory that poetry is born of "emotion recollected in tranquility" and with the rest of what he saw as "the romantic extravagance, the search for violent sensation,… the loss of measure…" The rest of the nineteenth century was for Belloc further decay. In a grouchy mood once he wrote to a friend expressing a desire to write a series called "Twelve Great Eunuchs of the Victorian Period." He reserved his most caustic comments, however, for the modern poets. One poet, "spared to middle age in spite of the wrath of God," Belloc called "famous for that he could neither scan nor rhyme—let alone think or feel." And modern English lyric poetry was mere "chopped up prose."

Fairly early in his life Belloc gave up trying to endure modern poetry. Except for the books written by his friends, he read little but the Latin and Greek classics in their original languages. His poetic principles are defined clearly in his book on Milton, whom he considered the last major classical poet in English:

He felt to his marrow the creative force of restraint, proportion, unity—and that is the classic… Rule and its authority invigorated the powers of man as pruning will a tree, as levees a pouring river. Diversity without extravagance, movement which could be rhythmic because it knew boundaries and measure, permanence through order, these were, and may again be, the inestimable fruits of the classical spirit.

To the opinion that the classical style was tired, Belloc responded that "those whose energy is too abundant seek for themselves by an instinct the necessary confines without which such energy is wasted," and that "energy alone can dare to be classical."

Despite his many comments on the necessity of classical restraint, Belloc did not believe that great poetry was merely the result of regular rhythms and rhymes. Like the Romantics he scorned, he felt that a poet is more than a craftsman. Just as the Romantics spoke of the divine inspiration for which they served as a vehicle, Belloc wrote that "something divine is revealed in the poetic speech, not through the poet's will but through some superior will using the poet for its purpose. It is the afflatus of the God.… [t]he seed of Poetry floats in from elsewhere. It is not of this world." His definition of poetic inspiration is thus explicitly theistic—god-oriented—whereas the Romantics were more likely to think of poetry as a revelation of the god in Man. Basically, the difference is a matter of terminology and external beliefs, not of essentials. But Belloc was adamant in his views on poetic form, and so he went his own unpopular way during the years of poetic upheaval and innovation.

Belloc's respect for the classical conception of poetry is immediately apparent in his first volume of poetry, Verses and Sonnets (1896). Establishing a pattern that he was to follow in all of his books of poetry, Belloc arranged his work according to genre: sonnets, songs, epigrams, and satires. Like the ancients, he believed that poetry is a deliberate and self-conscious utterance and that an idea or emotion has to be expressed in an appropriate genre to achieve its meaning.

Belloc's concern for the plight of the poor, for example, is expressed in two poems, one a satire and one a sonnet. "The Justice of the Peace," the satire, is a scathing dramatic monologue that begins with this stanza:

In his sonnet on the same subject, "The Poor of London," Belloc ignores the conflict among the social classes and focuses instead on the plight of the poor:

Almighty God, whose justice like a sun
Shall coruscate along the floors of Heaven,
Raising what's low, perfecting what's undone,
Breaking the proud and making odd things even,
The poor of Jesus Christ along the street
In your rain sodden, in your snows unshod,
They have nor hearth, nor sword, nor human meat,
Nor even the bread of men: Almighty God.

The different perspectives on this situation are achieved through Belloc's careful use of the two genres. The satire is grimly cheerful, as befitting the confrontation between the rich man and the beggar. The sonnet, on the other hand, is almost a prayer to Christ to alleviate the suffering of the poor. The sonnet, the most popular genre of love poets, is perfectly appropriate for this different kind of love poem.

Social justice was one of Belloc's two major concerns at this time in his life. The other was Elodie, whom he married in 1896, soon after the publication of Verses and Sonnets. "The Harbour" dramatizes his frustration in waiting five years for her consent. Belloc uses a metaphor that was popular during the Renaissance in Europe:

In "Love and Honour" he uses another favorite strategy of the Renaissance: the personification of abstract concepts. The impatient male is always Love, the reluctant female is Honour. In the traditional conflict Love tries unsuccessfully to conquer Honour, who retreats and thus conquers him by her virtue. After Belloc waits "a full five years' unrest," Honour appears to him one night:

Belloc loved Elodie, but he was also in love with English poetry.

Time, the enemy of all lovers, is the subject of many of the poems in Belloc's first collection. In "Her Music" he expresses the fear that the enchantment of his love will "stir strange hopes" of immortality, "And make me dreamer more than dreams are wise." The theme of mutability is explored in the highlight of the volume, Sonnets of the Twelve Months, which contain some of Belloc's best descriptive poetry. "January," for instance, contains this chilling portrait:

Death, with his evil finger to his lip,
Leers in at human windows, turning spy
To learn the country where his rule shall lie
When he assumes perpetual generalship.

The brisk March wind is described in a line that combines perfectly the sense and the sound: "Roaring he came above the white waves' tips!" The sonnets of the early summer months provide a gentle interlude before the declining half of the year. In several of the sonnets about the later months Belloc builds the poem around a famous European battle scene. In "July," for instance, he describes the Christian kings returning from the Crusades and states, "I wish to God that I had been with them…". In "August" Belloc's historical imagination transports him to Charlemagne's great victory at Roncesvalles. In "September" he becomes a participant in the French Revolution: "But watching from that eastern casement, I / Saw the Republic splendid in the sky, / And round her terrible head the morning stars." The best of the twelve sonnets is "December," which ends with this sestet:

For now December, full of agéd care,
Comes in upon the year and weakly grieves;
Mumbling his lost desires and his despair;
And with mad trembling hand still interweaves
The dank sear flower-stalks tangled in his hair,
While round about him whirl the rotten leaves.

This passage, reminiscent of King Lear, is an appropriate conclusion to the sonnet sequence, for it unifies and transcends the individual battle scenes in a final portrait of human suffering. Belloc's love of European history, which was to become apparent in his numerous prose studies, is here given its shape by the poet's sensibility.

Mankind's suffering and despair are not meaningless, however. Belloc focuses on the proud and defiant warriors, such as Charlemagne with his "bramble beard flaked red with foam / Of bivouac wine-cups…," because they represent man's attempt to confront and conquer the forces of disorder and anarchy. Similarly, Belloc the poet enters into their world in his attempt to give meaning to their stories through his sonnets. "The sonnet," he wrote, "demands high verse more essentially than does any other looser form.… [T]he sonnet is the prime test of a poet." In his first book he proudly announced his allegiance to the powers of poetry in its fight against the transience of man.

With his prose and then his parliamentary career occupying his time, Belloc did not publish his next volume of poetry until 1910. Verses includes many of the poems from Verses and Sonnets. Distinguishing the new verses from the old is not difficult, however, for the fourteen intervening years had changed Belloc dramatically. Whereas the first volume is marked by a youthful vitality and exuberance, Verses is permeated by a sense of spiritual fatigue and loss that characterized all of Belloc's work in the second half of his life. The death of his wife and then of his son Louis a few years later was to make this outlook permanent, but in 1910 Belloc was already beginning to characterize his life as a painful battle and to look backward to his youth as a carefree period of harmony with mankind and nature.

Yet the comic spirit is still alive in several poems. "Lines to a Don," for instance, is a comic diatribe against a "Remote and ineffectual Don / That dared attack my Chesterton." It is full of cascading insults such as these:

Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;
Don middle-class, Don sycophantic,
Don dull, Don brutish, Don pedantic…

A comic self-portrait, "The Happy Journalist," describes Belloc's pleasures:

The comic verses, however, represent only a small part of the newer poetry. Belloc's alienation from society is portrayed most characteristically as violent combat. In "The Rebel," for example, he pictures himself as a soldier fighting against the forces of "lies and bribes." After describing how he would, like Paul Revere, "summon a countryside," and kill the evil men, he vows to:

…batter their carven names,
And slit the pictures in their frames,
And burn for scent their cedar door,
And melt the gold their women wore,
And hack their horses at the knees…

In "The Prophet Lost in the Hills at Evening" this violent struggle is transferred to the battlefield of Belloc's soul as he envisions himself as God's warrior:

Belloc at this point in his life was a curious mixture of public ferocity and private anxiety. In public he was a courageous and selfless fighter, unafraid to elicit the wrath of the English people because of his unpopular pro-Boer stand, unafraid to speak out against the political corruption in his own party, and unafraid to attack the socialists, the atheists, and the Darwinians. Considering that he was always short of funds and that he could easily have earned far more money writing comic verse and less provocative histories, his decision to engage in these constant battles shows a remarkable strength of character. Poems such as "The Prophet," however, demonstrate the price he paid to maintain this public posture. Not only did he turn inward, he began to see himself as a divine messenger, a martyr who was being destroyed by the evil forces of the world.

The more successful poems in the 1910 collection are less self-consciously dramatic. "The South Country" pays homage to his native Sussex in simple and natural language:

Sussex became for Belloc not so much a county as a fortress. He was fully aware that this final scene is a fantasy, as are his self-portraits as a warrior or a religious martyr. The power of "The South Country" is his point that even though his dream is apparently humble, it is as unattainable as any attempt to turn back the clock.

The best poem in the collection, "Stanzas Written on Battersea Bridge During a South-Westerly Gale," dramatizes this thought rather than just stating it. Although Belloc never tired of criticizing Wordsworth, this poem shows that he learned the techniques of the meditative lyric from him. As his title suggests, the strategy of the poem is similar to Wordsworth's in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." Wordsworth begins his meditation by describing his impressions on revisiting the countryside that had meant so much to him when he was a boy. Belloc, on the other hand, pictures himself in London:

After describing his desperate wish to return to Sussex and his youth, he realizes that:

Unlike Wordsworth, whose realization of loss is tempered by a growth of understanding, Belloc sees no redemption in the passage of time. Like A. E. Housman, Belloc characterizes the journey from innocence to experience as a cruel joke. The last stanza is touched by an unreasonable self-pity, the indignation of a man who feels that his country has treated him unfairly—from the time of Oxford's refusal of the fellowship to his more recent struggles in the literary and political arenas. This treatment, Belloc is saying, is particularly unfair, considering the great energy he expended trying to do the right thing. Rather than remain in his "rightful garden"—the sheltered world of poetry—he confronted his enemies tirelessly.

But this self-pity is offset by the simple beauty of the last line. As W. H. Auden says in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats,"

Belloc never did understand the ways in which he made his life more difficult than it might have been. "Stanzas Written on Battersea Bridge" is a complete failure as a logical argument, but it is a beautiful and moving evocation of his confusion.

The 1910 volume received little critical notice. The Times Literary Supplement [22 December 1910], however, called Belloc "specially successful with the music of a simple primitive rhythm."

Belloc's analyses of the war occupied his mind during this period of personal loss; he wrote little poetry. His third book of verse, Sonnets and Verse, was not published until 1923, thirteen years after his second book, twenty-seven years after his first. By this time he had had a chance to contemplate his disappointments and his grief. Despite his increasing activity as a Catholic apologist, he never was able to integrate his personal experience and his faith. Almost all of the new poems included in the 1923 volume record Belloc's struggle to understand his tragedies; in none of them does he offer a Christian explanation. Like the classical poets whose work he studied and emulated, he remained essentially a pagan. And like the pagans who stoically accepted death, he finally came to an uneasy peace with his fate.

Not all of the poems, of course, concern death. "Tarantella" is a song about a subject Belloc knew well—"the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees"—and "The Chanty of the 'Nona'" is a sea song commemorating a sail he took in 1914 along the western and southern coasts of England. For these songs, and for many others he wrote, he composed melodies that he loved to sing aloud. Sonnets and Verse also contains a number of stinging epigrams, such as "Epitaph on the Politician Himself":

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

"On his Books" is a clever statement of a professional writer's aspirations:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

The mood of the volume, however, is most closely expressed by "The False Heart":

I said to Heart, "How goes it?" Heart replied:
"Right as a Ribstone Pippin!" But it lied.

The bulk Of Sonnets and Verse is love sonnets to Elodie. Several of them may in fact have been written before her death. The reader cannot tell because Belloc has stripped the poems down to an essential emotion—his love for her—which never changed in the sixty years following their first meeting. Any one of these sonnets demonstrates the timeless quality of his love:

Belloc's definition of the sonnet form was very strict in one sense: he felt that the poet has to establish a clear break between the octave—the first eight lines—and the sestet—the other six. About the various rhyme schemes Belloc was silent, but he felt that the essence of the sonnet is the contrast between the unity of the octave and the response or elaboration of the sestet.

In this sonnet to Elodie the octave-sestet contrast embodies the meaning. The octave is the definition of how people attempt to deal with the passage of time. The first quatrain is Belloc's description of the ravages of time; the second quatrain is the description of how people react. Without identifying who these people are, he subtly distinguishes them from himself by using the distancing pronoun "they" in the first quatrain and the parallel grammatical structure in the second. Phrases such as "now to this thing, now to t'other" suggest the helplessness of these anonymous victims as they are buffeted uncontrollably by the seas of "swift-eddying time."

To the chaotic movement Belloc opposes his image of the stillness of Elodie. The contrast is introduced immediately by the transitional "But" and the first-person pronoun. His realization—the "cry" in the final couplet—is an exclamation of joy that contrasts with the "noisy fame" to which other people devote themselves. By creating this perfectly refined image of beauty, Belloc manages to cheat time. The point made by this poem is that his image may have occurred in 1900 or 1923. Man can freeze time in a memory, and an artist can convey that memory in a timeless work of art.

If several of Belloc's sonnets demonstrate the poet's ability to capture an image and thereby stop time, others confront the issue of Elodie's death directly. One attitude characteristic of some of these sonnets is the consolation that Elodie enjoyed and contributed to all of the valuable aspects of mortal life. This attitude is expressed, for instance, in the sestet of "When you to Acheron's ugly water come," in which Belloc describes the majesty and nobility with which Elodie died:

Unlike the "formless mourners" who stretch their hands longingly toward death, Elodie demonstrated in her death the grace she embodied in her life. Significantly, Belloc uses the pagan metaphor of crossing the river of death, despite his reference to the Catholic faith. His focus remains on the values of the living, not on the joys of the Christian afterlife. This poem was probably written some years after her death, when he was finally able to write about it with a more peaceful stoicism.

If Belloc could ultimately accept Elodie's death in some of his poetry, he was less successful in dealing with it in his real life. He wrote, as late as 1922, one year before the publication of Sonnets and Verse, that "my cancer of loss gets worse and worse with every year and I grow fixed in the void of my wife and my son…" Belloc never tried to forget his wife and son; on the contrary, he seems to have derived some solace from the rituals of grief. He wore only black from the day of Elodie's death, used funereal stationery, and traced the sign of the Cross upon her door before he went to bed every night at King's Land.

Belloc's inability to let go of Elodie is dramatized in several of the poems in Sonnets and Verse. One sonnet in particular shows this response:

We will not whisper, we have found the place
Of silence and the endless halls of sleep:
And that which breathes alone throughout the deep,
The end and the beginning: and the face
Between the level brows of whose blind eyes
Lie plenary contentment, full surcease
Of violence, and the passionless long peace
Wherein we lose our human lullabies.

Look up and tell the immeasurable height
Between the vault of the world and your dear head;
That's death, my little sister, and the night
Which was our Mother beckons us to bed,
Where large oblivion in her house is laid
For us tired children, now our games are played.

Here Belloc pictures the death of his wife and himself as a peaceful sleep, a respite from the shocks of the world. Death will be safe, for he and Elodie are only children who are obeying their mother's request that they go to bed. In an epigram, "The Statue," he explores the same idea of his accompanying Elodie:

When we are dead, some Hunting-boy will pass
And find a stone half-hidden in tall grass
And grey with age: but having seen that stone
(Which was your image), ride more slowly on.

This beautiful and simple poem epitomizes Sonnets and Verse. The poet and his beloved are now gone, but life continues as always on earth, except that a passerby will be struck by her beauty as it is reflected by her gravestone. These love poems that Belloc wrought out of his grief were his memorial to Elodie. Sonnets and Verse thus represented for him a catharsis. By defining himself as Elodie's companion, he was able finally to stop the aching movement of time without his wife, just as in the earlier love poems he was able to create a fixed image of her.

The 1923 volume of poetry brought considerable critical reaction, largely because Belloc had become by that time one of the best-known English men of letters. An article in the Saturday Review [November 10, 1923], for example, was titled "Mr. Belloc—Poet" and speculated that one of the reasons he was not taken as seriously as a poet as he might have wished was that he wrote so much prose. The anonymous reviewer suggested that "he might, if he had confined himself to poetry, have been hailed as a master…" Along with several other commentators, the reviewer argued that "it is in rare gleams of an essential and peculiar loveliness, where the poet's strength and tenderness meet, that his bid for immortality is made." [In December 2, 1923] Filson Young, writing in the New York Times, also commented on the relative slimness of Belloc's poetic output: "He seldom will condescend to be merely an artist, but in this book of later poetry he returns, not without a shade of irony, to his old trade of using language as an instrument to evoke beauty." Belloc had become a respected and admired poet of the classical style.

The final volume of poetry, also called Sonnets and Verse (1938), is distinct from the 1923 volume in that it offers only a few brief lyrics to the memory of Elodie. In all other respects, however, Belloc remained unchanged. The generic classification system that the poet maintained emphasized this continuity. The "Epigrams" section of the 1923 volume, for instance, concludes with "Partly from the Greek." The 1938 collection, without skipping a beat, simply continues with the next epigram, "From the Same."

"The Fire," a melancholy description of how time has destroyed his hopes, is the best example of Belloc's later poetry. The self-assured pleasures of youth are described in the opening stanza, which gallops along carelessly in tetrameter lines.

We rode together all in pride,
They laughing in their riding gowns
We young men laughing at their side,
We charged at will across the downs.

The assault by time, however, cannot be resisted: "The golden faces charged with sense / Have broken to accept the years." The speaker, now alone and perplexed, demonstrates Belloc's ability to change the tone radically while maintaining the tetrameter lines:

Were they not here, the girls and boys?
I hear them. They are at my call.
The stairs are full of ghostly noise,
But there is no one in the hall.

Also characteristic of Belloc are the biting epigrams. One victim is a pacifist: "Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, / But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right." Another victim, a Puritan, Belloc would classify a religious eccentric: "He served his God so faithfully and well / That now he sees him face to face, in hell And, as always, Belloc loved to define the political animal, as in "On Two Ministers of State":

Lump says that Caliban's of gutter breed,
And Caliban says Lump's a fool indeed,
And Caliban and Lump and I are all agreed.

Belloc's poetic masterpiece, "Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine," is also included in the 1938 Sonnets and Verse. Both poetically and philosophically, it is his most mature composition. The term "heroic poem" in the title refers to the poetic form: rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, sometimes called heroic couplets or heroic verse. By choosing this demanding poetic form for a work of over two hundred lines, he was distinguishing himself from the world of modern poetry and allying himself with the classical Greek and Roman writers and, in England, with Dryden and Pope.

Belloc chose the heroic couplet because it complemented the world and the spirit he wanted to celebrate:

To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend,
To welcome home mankind's mysterious friend:
Wine, true begetter of all arts that be;
Wine, privilege of the completely free;
Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong;
Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong,
Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!

This classical invocation leads into a description of Bacchus, driving his chariot pulled by a team of panthers, swooping down over Europe and creating, everywhere, "The Vines, the conquering Vines!" (1. 35)

After this definition of the creation of the vineyards, Belloc begins his greatest passage of high comic verse:

But what are these that from the outer murk
Of dense mephitic vapours creeping lurk
To breathe foul airs from that corrupted well
Which oozes slime along the floor of Hell?
These are the stricken palsied brood of sin
In whose vile veins, poor, poisonous and thin,
Decoctions of embittered hatreds crawl:
These are the Water-Drinkers, cursed all!
On what gin-sodden Hags, what flaccid sires
Bred these White Slugs from what exhaust desires?

The conflict between the misguided water-drinkers and the godly wine-drinkers is not resolved; despite his comic treatment, Belloc is portraying nothing less than the struggle of Catholics "in these last unhappy days / When beauty sickens and a muddied robe / Of baseness fouls the universal globe."

The final movement of the poem begins on an elegiac note:

When from the waste of such long labour done
I too must leave the grape-ennobling sun
And like the vineyard worker take my way
Down the long shadows of declining day,
Bend on the sombre plain my clouded sight
And leave the mountain to the advancing night,
Come to the term of all that was mine own
With nothingness before me, and alone;
Then to what hope of answer shall I turn?

Raising his chalice of sacramental wine to the God he cannot see, he prepares to reenter "my Father's Kingdom." "Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine" combines a sustained technical virtuosity with Belloc's most sophisticated vision: a subtle mingling of the pagan earth and the Christian sky. He worked on the poem for some twenty years. More important, however, he lived most of his life before he could understand and articulate—just this once—the essential unity of comedy and tragedy on earth.

The critical essay that most insightfully defines how the 1938 volume illuminated Belloc appeared in The Catholic World [August, 1939]: "… the volume contains more than one indication that his faith, robust and virile as it is, has been wrested from the teeth of doubt." The other journals concentrated on Belloc's pursuit of the classical poetic virtues of craftsmanship, control, precision, and clarity of expression. The Times Literary Supplement [May 28, 1938] contrasted Belloc with the "new severe young men" who sacrificed form for intellectual content. Critic George Sampson wrote, in 1941, that:

Belloc's serious poems, slight in quantity, are exquisite in quality. His sonnets are the finest modern examples of that much tried form. His songs can laugh and laud and deride with the ribald vigour of the past and the effective point of the present. No one in recent times has touched sacred themes with such appealing delicacy. The poems of Belloc show triumphantly how a modern writer can follow an old tradition and remain master of himself.

Belloc was characteristically—and extravagantly—humble about his poetry. He once wrote that "I am one who by nature writes commonplace verse, which I then slowly tinker at and turn into less commonplace." He did not believe this for an instant, of course, but just as he refused to call his verse "poetry"—a term he considered too exalted for his efforts—he would not allow himself a public display of pride. But when the critics praised the poems he sculpted and polished, Belloc must have smiled inwardly.