Service Of All The Dead

Between the avenue of cypresses, All in their scarlet capes and surplices Of linen, go the chaunting choristers, The priests in gold and black, the villagers.

And all along the path to the cemetery The round dark heads of men crowd silently; And black-scarfed faces of women-folk wistfully Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery.

And at the foot of a grave a father stands With sunken head and forgotten, folded hands; And at the foot of a grave a mother kneels With pale shut face, nor neither hears nor feels.

The coming of the chaunting choristers Between the avenue of cypresses, The silence of the many villagers, The candle-flames beside the surplices.

(Remember the English pronunciation of "cemetery" is not the common American one.) He is surely better as a looker-on at life than when he tries to present the surging passions of an actor-in-chief. Then his art is full of sound and fury, and instead of being thrilled, we are, as Stevenson said of Whitman's poorer poems, somewhat indecorously amused. All poets, I suppose, are thrilled by their own work; they read it to themselves with shudders of rapture; but it is only when this frisson is felt by others than blood-relatives that they may feel some reasonable assurance of success. The London Times quite properly refuses to surrender to lines like these:

And if I never see her again? I think, if they told me so, I could convulse the heavens with my horror. I think I could alter the frame of things in my agony. I think I could break the System with my heart. I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break.

He should change his gear from high to low; he will never climb Parnassus on this speed, not even with his muffler so manifestly open.

The Times also quotes without appreciation from the same volume the following passage, where the woman, looking back, stirs a biblical reminiscence.

I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my chest, my belly, Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through my defenceless nakedness, I have been thrust into white sharp crystals, Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated, Ah, Lot's wife, Lot's wife! The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column of salt, like a waterspout That has enveloped me!

Most readers may not need a whole pillar, but they will surely take the above professions cum grano salis. It is all in King Cambyses' vein; and I would that we had Pistol to deliver it. I cite it here, not for the graceless task of showing Mr. Lawrence at his worst, but because such stuff symptomatic of many of the very "new" poets, who wander, as Turgenev expressed it, "aimless but declamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother earth."

John Drinkwater, born on the first of June, 1882, has had varied experiences both in business and in literature, and is at present connected with the management of the Birmingham Repertory theatre. Actively engaged in commercial life, he has found time to publish a number of volumes of poems, plays in verse, critical works in prose, and a long string of magazine articles. He has wisely collected in one volume--though I regret the omission of Malvern Lyrics--the best of his poems that had previously appeared in four separate works, containing the cream of his production from 1908 to 1914. His preface to this little book, published in 1917, is excellent in its manly modesty. "Apart from the Cromwell poem itself, the present selection contains all that I am anxious to preserve from those volumes, and there is nothing before 1908 which I should wish to be reprinted now or at any time." One of the earlier books had been dedicated to John Masefield, to whom in the present preface the author pays an affectionate compliment--"John Masefield, who has given a poet's praise to work that I hope he likes half as well as I like his."

The first poem, Symbols, prepares the reader for what is to follow, though it is somewhat lacking in the technique that is characteristic of most of Mr. Drinkwater's verse.

I saw history in a poet's song, In a river-reach and a gallows-hill, In a bridal bed, and a secret wrong, In a crown of thorns: in a daffodil.

I imagined measureless time in a day, And starry space in a wagon-road, And the treasure of all good harvests lay In the single seed that the sower sowed.

My garden-wind had driven and havened again All ships that ever had gone to sea, And I saw the glory of all dead men In the shadow that went by the side of me.

The West of England looms large in contemporary poetry. A. E. Housman, John Masefield, W. W. Gibson, J. E. Flecker have done their best to celebrate its quiet beauty; and some of the finest work of Mr. Drinkwater is lovingly devoted to these rural scenes. We know how Professor Housman and John Masefield regard Bredon Hill--another tribute to this "calm acclivity, salubrious spot" is paid in Mr. Drinkwater's cheerful song, At Grafton. The spirit of his work in general is the spirit of health--take life as it is, and enjoy it. It is the open-air verse of broad, windswept English counties. Its surest claim to distinction lies in its excellent, finished--he is a sound craftsman. But he has not yet shown either sufficient originality or sufficient inspiration to rise from the better class of minor poets. His verse-drama, The Storm, which was produced in Birmingham in 1915, shows strong resemblances to the one-act plays of Mr. Gibson and is not otherwise impressive.

William Henry Davies, the Welsh poet, exhibits in his half-dozen miniature volumes an extraordinary variety of subjects. Everything is grist. He was born of Welsh parentage in Monmouthshire on the twentieth of April, 1870. He became an American tramp, and practised this interesting profession six years; he made eight or nine trips to England on cattle-ships, working his passage; he walked about England selling pins and needles. He remarks that "he sometimes varied this life by singing hymns in the street." At the age of thirty-four he became a poet, and he insists--not without reason--that he has been one ever since. Readers may be at times reminded of the manner of John Davidson, but after all, Mr. Davies is as independent in his poetry as he used to be on the road.

Sometimes his verse is banal--as in the advice To a Working Man. But oftener his imagination plays on familiar scenes in town and country with a lambent flame, illuminating and glorifying common objects. He has the heart of the child, and tries to see life from a child's clear eyes.