While he took off his cap and his gloves and his coat, 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 ... 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; 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 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 They won't give in till Prussian Rule's been trod I wish they'd killed you in a decent show. This reads amazingly like prose, but the white heat of his indignation raises the simple theme of his thought up out of the ruck of ordinary commonplace, and the very ordinariness of it takes on the guise of something that is unforgettable; it may not be poetry, according to the critic's canon, but it strikes home and we feel, with the writer, "blind with tears" at the purposelessness of such wanton destruction. In the poem which gives the title to the book we are shown an old huntsman living over again by his cottage fireside great days of old with the hounds. He ponders on his probable future when he is dead: Hell was the coldest scenting land I've known, The ugliest hog-backed stile you've clapped your eyes on. And the main earth unstopped. There will be many lovers of the chase who will sympathise with that picture and turn with a thrill of further appreciation to this: I've come to think of God as something like And had to quit the saddle. Tall and spare, twinkled And easy walk Lord God might be like that, Some evening after hunting. Already we can see why Mr Sassoon dedicated his book to Thomas Hardy. There is the same passionate love of the countryside, the same sympathetic vision of the rustic, the same keen irony and Swift-like detestation of frippery and unreality. Mr Sassoon, like many other subalterns taking a hand in the “great game,” is filled with loathing at war under modern conditions, and he is too courageous to pretend that it is otherwise with him. He can even dare to sympathise with and openly print the sentiments of the one-legged man, which would certainly be censored or else howled down by nine-tenths of the fire-eating civilian population : Propped on a stick he viewed the August weald; How right it seemed that he should reach the span Safe with his wound, a citizen of life. He hobbled blithely through the garden gate, It is just as well that when future generations find themselves forgetting, amid the calm, slack waters of peace, the horrors that belong to war, they should |