NORMAN CAMERON
Norman Cameron, of Scottish ancestry, was born in Bombay in 1905 and educated at Fettes College and Oriel College, Oxford. After leaving the university he was for a while a superintendent of education in Nigeria before becoming an advertising copy-writer in London. In the thirties he contributed frequently to Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse and to Epilogue, the miscellany issued by Robert Graves and Laura Riding. He was awarded the M.B.E. for work on propaganda to German troops in Italy during the war, and he was with the British Forces in Austria until early in 1947, when he returned to his work in advertising.
He brought out the following books of verse: The Winter House (1935) and Work in Hand (1942), the latter also containing poems by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. He published Forgive Me, Sire (1950) and His Collected Poems (1957) were published posthumously with an introduction by Robert Graves.Edwin Muir described Cameron as "a neat, semi-epigrammatic poet", but this is a tepid way of referring to this precision and skill with words. The Winter House is a collection in which no single poem appears to have been forced. His poems wear well, and we suspect that they may be read when some fancied modern poets with much bigger reputations are quite forgotten. He died in 1953.
NAKED AMONG THE TREES
Formerly he had been a well-loved god,
Each visit from him a sweet episode,
Not like the outrageous Pentecostal rush
Or wilful Jahveh shrieking from a bush.
He bloomed in our bodies to the finger-tips
And rose like barley-sugar round the lips,
Then unawares was cleanly gone away,
With no relapse or after taint to pay.
We've forced the burgeoned lust he gave to us
Into a thousand manners of misuse,
Into the hot alarms, wishes and frets,
The drinking-bouts, the boasting and the bets.
And these have made his cult degenerate,
So that the booted Puritan magistrate
Did right to spur down on the devotees,
Catch them and whip them naked among the trees.
THE INVADER
Our shops and farms wide open lie;
Still the invader feels a lack:
Disquiet whets his gluttony
For what he may not carry back.
He prowls about in search of wealth
But has no skill to recognize
Our things of worth: we need no stealth
To mask them from his pauper eyes.
He calls for worship and amaze;
We give him yes-men in a row,
Reverberating that self-praise
He wearied of a while ago.
He casts around for some new whim,
Something preposterously more:
'Love me' he bids. We offer him
The slack embraces of a whore.
And when he spitefully makes shift
To share with us his pauperdom,
By forcing on us a gift
The shoddy wares he brought from home,
And watches that we sell and buy
Amongst us his degrading trash,
He gets no gain at all. Though sly
With what he knows, the guns and cash,
What he knows not he may not touch:
Those very spoils for which he came
Are still elusive to his clutch-
They swerve and scorch him like a flame.
Invader-outcast of all lands,
He lives condemned to gorge and crave,
To foul his feast with his own hands:
At once the oppressor and the slave.
Bibliography:
Warren Hope, Jonathan Barker (eds), Norman Cameron: Collected Poems and Selected Translations, Greenwich, Anvil Press poetry, 1990.
