among the clay and the worms. With Mr. Yeats and Samuel Ferguson, with Lionel Johnson and G. W. Russell, Synge parts company irrevocably. The doctrine of the beautiful word has no place in his theory of poetry. Had he chosen he might have elaborated the argument against poetic diction; but he was less concerned with poetic diction per se than with the humanizing of poetry. And what Synge attempted to do the modern poets are attempting to do-to shun preciosity, to face the profoundest facts of life, to explore the accepted discoveries of science and make them understanded of the general in language such as they habitually employ, in the hope of finding in the new world imaginative stimuli infinitely broader and deeper than those themes that have hitherto been regarded as matters for poetic treatment implicitly and deliberately defined by the poets of romanticism, who have in sooth seen far, but who, in the light of what the moderns would doubtless deem the larger vision stand, as yet, only at the threshold.1 With the publication of Barrack Room Ballads in 1892 Kipling too gave the lie direct to the aesthetics. In this new poetry-this poetry of buoyancy and rejuvenation-he did exactly what Wordsworth explained he had been trying to do 'to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect. Despite his frequent, facile journalese, Kipling went to the very roots of the fundamentals and found there beauty and romance, humour and pathos and a basal human kinship. In the purely local he discovered the universal; in the small things he found the eternal. When Masefield startled the poetry-reading world with The Everlast Mercy in 1911, one might almost have thought that he had the formulated demands of Synge in mind during the performance of his task; 'the strong things of life are needed in poetry also . . . and it may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must be brutal. It is easy to locate the old wells from which Mr. Masefield drew fresh inspiration.

'Anglia, N.F. XXV.

He learned something of his frankness, his directness, his brutality, his free-spokenness, his impressionism and his faculty for minute description from association with 'our maister dere and father reverent', Dan Chaucer in his walks abroad with him in the eternal freshness of the mediaeval prime. He is the debtor too of Warwickshire Will, of melancholy Heine, of vagabond François and of the wonderful Ayrshire exciseman. A motley company but a goodly! His glowing passion for morality redeems Masefield from the reproach of sordid realism and there are moments when he reaches the very heights of poetic intensity. August, 1914 is a simple little poem, yet its vibrant, emotionalized sense of England, and its poignant realization of the significance of war place it among the immortal lines in the language.

These homes, the valley spread before me here,,
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past speaking dear
To unknown generations of dead men,

Who, century after century held these farms
And, looking out to watch the changing sky,
Heard, as we hear the rumours and alarms

Of war at hand and dangers pressing nigh,

And know as we know, that the message meant

The breaking off of ties, the loss of friends,

Death, like a miser getting in his rent

And no new stones laid where the trackway ends...

And died (uncouthly most) in foreign lands

For some idea but dimly understood

Of an English city, never built by hands

Which love of England prompted and made good.

The revived interest in poetry in England during recent years has been due mainly to the successive volumes of Georgian verse, introduced by Edward Marsh who first called attention to Rupert Brooke. There had been no similar attempt in English since the publication of the famous Songs and Sonnettes commonly called Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. A pensive note characterized the first volume of Georgian Poetry, which was largely devoted to landscape description; but in The Stone (from Fires) Mr. W. W. Gibson voices the intense aspirations

and the struggles of plain, untutored, dumb folk after the familiar manner of the greatest of the Lakists. The Great War gave further opportunity to the poets; profound and repressed emotionalism found at last poignant expression. While the relationship between war and poetry is as old as war and poetry, it has rarely happened that noble poetry has been contemporaneous with the event. Poetry demands peace and quiet for its composition and in the late war our poets suffered from nearness to the event. They lost sight of the vision of the beauty of life in the horror of the immediate present. Neither the sense of tragic recollection as one finds it in the verse of Francis Ledwidge nor the fury of Siegfried Sassoon against the levity and frivolity and the false sentiment at home is the supreme expression of poetry:

The house is crammed; tier upon tier they grin
And cackle at the show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din
"They're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old tanks!'

I'd like to see a tank come down the stalls

Lurching to rag-time tunes or 'Home Sweet Home',

And there'd be no more jokes in music halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Mr. Binyon has some fine verses to women who have but the memory of and their pride in the glorious dead:

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.

Mr. Kipling has added at least one immortal distich to English patriotic poetry:

Who stands if Freedom fall?

Who dies if England live?

In Hardy's lyric from the Dynasts there is the anxious note of eager questioning as to the meaning of it all:

Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him and he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because-
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough, although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like-just as I-

Was out of work-had sold his traps-
No other reason why.

Yes, quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat, if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.

but in these following verses there is no trace of cynicism, no pessimism, no false sentiment, no weak rhetoric but unquestioning passionate sincerity:

What of the faith and fire within us,

Men who march away

Ere the barncocks say

Night is growing grey,

To hazards whence no tears can win us?
What of the faith and fire within us?
Men who march away.

In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just,
And that braggards must
Surely bite the dust,

March we to the fields ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just.

A distinct psychological evolution is traceable in these war poets who took Donne, Treherne, Vaughan, Arnold and Laurence Housman for their masters. The abstract theme of the terribleness of war which was the initial impelling motive is presently replaced by that of actual experience, and, with the sudden realization of individuality and the consciousness of acute physical peril on the battlefield they grow crudely real

istic and utter poignant words in short, simple, stabbing phrases. The artistic problem becomes that of reconciling the vivid portrayal of death and destruction with the essence of what poetry must always be the spiritual interpretation of the soul of man in conflict with his environment. The Five Sonnets of Rupert Brooke, with their keynote of sacrifice are poetry of pure gold. Julian Grenfell, too, passes beyond the mere physical fear of death and finds in very battle itself a sense of mystical safety and tranquillity:

The fighting man shall from the sun

Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with light foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth;
And finds, when fighting shall be done

Great rest and fullness after dearth.

The emotions of the War poets are simple and profound; their treatment of them such as might be anticipated by men living in the presence of the terror. When they become merely objectively realistic and describe a single vivid experience without imagination their work degenerates into mere cheap verse journalese:

This bloody steel has killed a man

I heard him squeal as on I ran.

He watched me come, with wagging head

I pressed it home, and he was dead.

Though clean and clear I wiped the steel,
I still can hear that dying squeal.

In a sense the greater bulk of War poetry was didactic; it preached the immediate doctrine of unselfishness and service in the present; it substituted strength and directness and sincerity for mere dilettante artistic experiment and intellectual exercise. And, lest we should be in danger of forgetting the great sacrifice, the Canadian John McRae has left us these beautiful and ineffaceable verses:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.