by KRISTIAN WILLIAMS
George Orwell: The Complete Poetry, ed. Dione Venables, Published by Finlay for The Orwell Society, 72 pages, £8.99.
George Orwell is remembered as an essayist, a novelist, a cultural critic, and a critical socialist but not, generally speaking, as a poet. Yet he did write poetry — nonsense poetry, political poetry, romantic and lyrical verse, even the odd limerick. He wrote for pleasure, for friends and lovers, and for publication; and he incorporated bits of rhyme into his novels and journalism.
Finlay has just published a collection of Orwell’s poetry for The Orwell Society. It’s a slender, handsome volume, pleasant to hold in hand and quick to read. The book collects all forty-three surviving poems, more or less: the authenticity of a few is in doubt (and this is noted in the text), while several distinct couplets are grouped together as “Scraps of Nonsense Poetry.” A long essay by Dione Venables — part biography, part criticism — gracefully connects (or sometimes as importantly, distances) the very different items and turns what might easily have been little more than an extremely uneven chapbook into an insightful study into the development of a great writer.
The collection, arranged chronologically, begins with the Kiplingesque “Awake! Young Men of England,” written soon after the outbreak of the Great War by the eleven-year-old Eric Blair. The patriotic theme continues with 1916’s surpassingly competent “Kitchener,” commenting somberly on the Field Marshal’s death by drowning, the victim of a nautical mine. Indeed, though with greater irony, some of Orwell’s mature poetry is observably borne of the same patriotic impulse — especially “As One Non-Combatant to Another,” his biting reply to the pacifist Alex Comfort in the midst of the Second World War:
“And in the drowsy freedom of this island
You’re free to shout that England isn’t free;
They even chuck you cash, as bears get buns
For crying ‘Peace’ behind a screen of guns.”
Between the wars, Orwell went to Eton, and then to Burma; he tramped around London, washed dishes in Paris, taught school in Hayes, and commanded troops in revolutionary Spain. Each period left a mark upon Orwell’s writing. Satires upon school life in the style of Whitman, Coleridge, and (yes) Kipling (“If you can keep your face, when all about you Are doing their level best to push it in…”) appeared in the Eton paper College Days. Burma inspired bawdy songs about prostitutes, gloomy meditations on the apocalypse, and an epitaph in verse for “John Flory,” later the name of the protagonist in Burmese Days: “Money, women, cards & gin Were the four things that did him in.”As schoolmaster he wrote a play, King Charles II; one speech in verse, notable chiefly for its Royalist sentiment, is included in this collection.
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