With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.
And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones
Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over,
Onward and never returning, leaving no mark behind.

I suppose The Lily of Malud is the most famous poem in the book, and certainly in this magic narrative he justifies his use of his extraordinary metre:

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.

It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine

Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen, And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen.

This lily blooms once a year and dies in a night :

And when that night has come, black small-breasted maids, With ecstatic terror dumb, steal fawn-like through the shades

From the doors the maidens creep, Tiptoe over dreaming curs, soft, so soft, that not one stirs, And stand curved and a-quiver, like bathers by a river, Looking at the forest wall, groups of slender naked girls, Whose black bodies shine like pearls where the moonbeams fall.

They move

Onwards on the scarce-felt path, with quick and desperate breath,

For their circling fingers dread to caress some slimy head,
Or to touch the icy shape of a hunched and hairy ape,
And at every step they fear in their very midst to hear
A lion's rending roar or a tiger's snore
And when things swish or fall, they shiver but dare not
call.

Having beheld the vision they return home and are as they ever were:

Save only for a rare shade of trouble in their eyes.

And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts

Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then,
Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin,
Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony,
Chip and grunt and do not see.

But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut,

trying to remember

Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely

seen

Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green. Something holy in the past that came and did not last. But she knows not what it was.

This poem as has much "atmosphere" in it as The Ancient Mariner, and improves with every reading.

But for myself I prefer To a Bulldog to any other poem that Mr Squire has written or is ever likely to write. It is by far the most effective war-poem of its kind, its very simplicity adding a million-fold to its poignancy. It stands the test of being read aloud without, as he himself says of some one else's poetry, making you feel a fool at being let down in any line:

We sha'n't see Willy any more, Mamie,

He won't be coming any more :

He came back once and again and again,

But he won't get leave any more.

We looked from the window and there was his cab,

And we ran downstairs like a streak,

And he said "Hullo, you bad dog," and you crouched to the floor,

Paralysed to hear him speak,

And then let fly at his face and his chest

Till I had to hold you down,

While he took off his cap and his gloves and his coat,
And his bag and his thonged Sam Browne. .

Then follows a picture of the dog's master on leave fondling all the drawings he had left behind, and opening the cupboard to look at his belongings every time he came :

But now I know what a dog doesn't know
And all your life you will never know
What I wouldn't tell you even if I could,
That the last time we waved him away
Willy went for good. . .

He ruminates over the good days that are now over for ever:

When summer comes again,

And the long sunsets fade,

We shall have to go on playing the feeble game for two That since the war we've played.

And though you run expectant as you always do

To the uniforms we meet,

You'll never find Willy among all the soldiers

In even the longest street.

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,

While you lie asleep on the floor;

For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of, And he won't be coming here any more.

I pass over Under, which is an unintelligible nightmare, and the long poem on Rivers, which almost succeeds in being great in spite of its lack of rhyme, and he finishes with a sonnet which many people place at the head of his achievement :

I shall make beauty out of many things:

Lights, colours, motions, sky and earth and sea, The soft unbosoming of all the springs

Which that inscrutable hand allows to me,

Odours of flowers, sounds of smitten strings,

The voice of many a wind in many a tree,
Fields, rivers, moors, swift feet and floating wings,
Rocks, caves, and hills that stand and clouds that flee.
Men also and women, beautiful and dear,

Shall come and pass and leave a fragrant breath;
And my own heart, laughter and pain and fear,
The majesties of evil and of death;

But never, never shall my verses trace

The loveliness of your most lovely face.

A poem which taken together with Envoi may well be said to place Mr Squire high among contemporary poets:

Beloved, when my heart's awake to God
And all the world becomes his testimony,
In you I most do see, in your brave spirit,
Erect and certain, flashing deeds of light,
A pure jet from the fountain of all being,
A scripture clearer than all else to read.
And when belief was dead and God a myth,
And the world seemed a wandering mote of evil,
Endurable only by its impermanence,

And all the planets perishable urns

Of perished ashes, to you alone I clung

Amid the unspeakable loneliness of the universe.

I

III

SIEGFRIED SASSOON

T seems a far cry from the old days of the Bullingdon, the Rousers, and the Loder, when whips

were cracked in "Peck," and young men rejoiced in the hunt of the fox with the Bicester and the "Drag," to the war-poetry of 1917, but Mr Sassoon has effectually bridged the distance.

In The Old Huntsman and Other Poems he has collected some seventy-odd poems, which mark him out as one of the little group of young warriors who felt impelled to put their impressions of war into verse, one with them in his appreciation of the beautiful and his curiosity about the dead, but not in the least like any other of them in his manner of writing or the conclusions at which he arrives about the effect which fighting has upon him.

In the first place he is colloquial, pellucidly clear, simple, terse, and straightforward. He dwells rather on the ironic side of it all; as a satirist in verse he excels. He, least of all the younger poets, can find glamour and nobility in the war. He paints ruthlessly what he sees, and what he sees is no thin red line or charge of heavy or light brigade. For the most part he regards war as an intolerable waste of good material.

To any Dead Officer who left School for the Army in 1914, he writes:

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

And tell Him that our Politicians swear