The poetry of Sir Charles Sherrington

Abstract

The title-poem in Sherrington's The Assaying of Brabantius (1925) is a substantial piece taking up about three-sevenths of the volume. A third of the remaining poems ascertainably belong to the period of the First World War, but this visionary allegory with a quasi-mediaeval setting offers itself as a relatively early work. Its theme of the sinner redeemed by the innocent love for a boy (yet compelled to give him up) belongs more obviously to the Victorian or Edwardian poetic landscape. Brabantius is a hedonist, who has ignored all appeals from his family. His selfish nature is represented by a ‘varlet janitor’ who keeps the real world at bay, and the paternal love which restores him to human feeling by a poor orphan whom he sees praying to the Virgin in the snow, and whom he adopts and educates. This process of repudiating the baser instincts and acquiring nobility through altruism seems as arbitrary as the psychic events in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner . The guilt is as severely felt, and the exoneration as uncalled-for: Of gifts that bring men meed of bliss where is one blessed as loving is that so blest is its very cares do but enhance it unawares (p. 18)Coleridge's sailor also blesses the watersnakes ‘unawares’, and is released from the burden of the albatross. Brabantius is similarly burdened with guilt, and his redemption is as hard-won as the tortuous syntax of these couplets that describe (in part) the process. But they are struggling to express a Christian paradox, that love is itself better if it involves anguish. Somehow it is much better to have sinned, a greater relief to the soul. Brabantius lets the boy (now grown up and eager to seek his fortune) sail away to a new life, and is himself …