A Spring Harvest, Geoffrey Bache Smith - a Review

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Spring Harvest, Geoffrey Bache Smith – a Review

I bought my copy of Geoffrey Bache Smith’s A Spring Harvest from That Company via the InterGossip, and caution those wishing to read Smith’s poems to verify the quality of what they are buying.

There is a contemporary problem with all sorts of people cobbling together all sorts of drivel and finding a way of tacking the names of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien to these mashups in order to make a sale.

Shameful borrowers lacking any creativity of their own, for instance, often write pastiche letters from Screwtape, an unfortunate practice even with children, who at least can plead youthful ignorance, but adults, who should demonstrate a sense of ethics, have gotten away with looting Lewis’ works for profit.

The recent film biography of Tolkien is universally condemned, and rightly so. One hopes the fine young actors’ careers aren’t stalled, and that the producers’ careers are.

A more recent misfortune is a crudely glued-together pamphlet of the poems of Geoffrey Bache Smith, a friend and schoolmate of Tolkien’s who was killed in France in 1916.

After the war, as a tribute to his boyhood friend and as a kindness to his grieving mother, Tolkien edited some of Smith’s poems into a little book, A Spring Harvest, and had them printed.

Undoubtedly the original edition was thoughtfully set out by the publishers.

This 2020 printing is a mess. The only identifying information is inside the back cover, probably because the perpetrators do not wish to be known:

Made in the USA
Coppell, TX
07 July 2020

Presumably Smith’s poems are out of copyright; even so, this shabby “Coppell, TX” treatment should never have happened: the typeface is inappropriate, the layout is crude, and the cover is a greasy, fingerprint-y sheet of cardboard. The copy of a copy of a copy of a photograph shows us that in the anonymous editor’s mind Lieutenant Smith should be depicted in an unhappy shade of aqua.

And now to the poems: Smith was only 22 when he died of his wounds, and so his work can fairly be regarded as juvenilia, with some good exceptions. He was the product of the middle class and a good education (not simply staring into a screen and pushing buttons), and was an inheritor of Romantic and Victorian usages and traditions. His formal diction can seem stilted, but such was common in the days of parlour poetry. Smith was just out of boyhood, and so was learning his way through language and poetry. His usage and content is formed on Celtic mythology, King Arthur, and knights and their ladies fair, and a sense of loyalty to nation, king, and empire that seems wholly alien now: “Sonnet to the British Navy,” for instance, is painful to read.

Smith’s structure, though, is excellent. “Sonnet to the British Navy” is certainly derivative in wording and style, but the artistic discipline of his precise Shakespearean sonnet form is much to be praised. In a time when most poetry is nothing more than insipid, undisciplined, self-obsessed, me-me-me-poor-me free verse, Smith’s command of meter and rhyme is to be praised.

One of the most delightful poems in the pamphlet is “Pure Virginia,” a tribute to American tobacco. This is a well-crafted Petrarchan sonnet in which Smith forgets to be too formal and lets himself have a little fun.

The most touching poem is “Domum Redi Poeta” (the poet returns home). The Latin is not an affectation; like all carefully brought up children until fairly recently, Smith, Lewis, and Tolkien were quite at home in the language of ancient Rome, even in making jokes and writing poetry.

This little two-stanza piece in rhyming iambic tetrameter expresses the poet’s desire to return to the innocent joys of his boyhood home, and knowing as we do that he didn’t, the pathos is very real.

A Spring Harvest shows us the unfulfilled promise of a life ended young in yet another futile war. Geoffrey Bache Smith died well, though, and in his brief life accomplished more than taking selfies and watching television.

For those who are fond of the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and their friends), A Spring Harvest will be a worthy edition to their libraries - in another edition.

-30-