Chapter IX: On Account of ILL Health

You go, brave friends, and I am cast to stay behind,
To read with frowning eyes and discontented mind
The shining history that you are gone to make,
To sleep with working brain, to dream and to awake
Into another day of most ignoble peace,
To drowse, to read, to smoke, to pray that war may cease.
The spring is coming on, and with the spring you go
In countries where strange scents on the April breezes blow;
You'll see the primroses marched down into the mud,
You'll see the hawthorn-tree wear crimson flowers of blood
And I shall walk about, as I did walk of old,
Where the laburnum trails its chains of useless gold,
I'll break a branch of may, I'll pick a violet
And see the new-born flowers that soldiers must forget,
I'll love, I'll laugh, I'll dream and write undying songs
But with your regiment my marching soul belongs.
Men that have marched with me and men that I have led
Shall know and feel the things that I have only read,
Shall know what thing it is to sleep beneath the skies
And to expect their death what time the sun shall rise.
Men that have marched with me shall march to peace again,
Bringing for plunder home glad memories of pain,
Of toils endured and done, of terrors quite brought under,
And all the world shall be their plaything and their wonder.
Then in that new-born world, unfriendly and estranged,
I shall be quite alone, I shall be left unchanged.

_The Pool._

Out of that noise and hurry of large life
The river flings me in an idle pool:
The waters still go on with stir and strife
And sunlit eddies, and the beautiful
Tall trees lean down upon the mighty flow,
Reflected in that movement. Beauty there
Waxes more beautiful, the moments grow
Thicker and keener in that lovely air
Above the river. Here small sticks and straws
Come now to harbour, gather, lie and rot,
Out of cross-currents and the water's flaws
In this unmoving death, where joy is not,
Where war's a shade again, ambition rotten
And bitter hopes and fears alike forgotten.

_The Dead Poet._

When I grow old they'll come to me and say:
Did you then know him in that distant day?
Did you speak with him, touch his hand, observe
The proud eyes' fire, soft voice and light lips' curve?
And I shall answer: This man was my friend;
Call to my memory, add, improve, amend
And count up all the meetings that we had
And note his good and touch upon his bad.

When I grow older and more garrulous,
I shall discourse on the dead poet thus:
I said to him ... he answered unto me...
He dined with me one night in Trinity...
I supped with him in King's ... Ah, pitiful
The twisted memories of an ancient fool
And sweet the silence of a young man dead!
Now far in Lemnos sleeps that golden head,
Unchanged, serene, for ever young and strong,
Lifted above the chances that belong
To us who live, for he shall not grow old
And only of his youth there shall be told
Magical stories, true and wondrous tales,
As of a god whose virtue never fails,
Whose limbs shall never waste, eyes never fall,
And whose clear brain shall not be dimmed at all.

PASTORAL PIECES

_The Vision in the Wood._

The husht September afternoon was sweet
With rich and peaceful light. I could not hear
On either side the sound of moving feet
Although the hidden road was very near.
The laden wood had powdered sun in it,
Slipped through the leaves, a quiet messenger
To tell me of the golden world outside
Where fields of stubble stretched through counties wide.

And yet I did not move. My head reposed
Upon a tuft of dry and scented grass
And, with half-seeing eyes, through eyelids closed,
I watched the languid chain of shadows pass,
Light as the slowly moving shade imposed
By summer clouds upon a sea of glass,
And strove to banish or to make more clear
The elusive and persistent dream of her.

And then I saw her, very dim at first,
Peering for nuts amid the twisted boughs,
Thought her some warm-haired dryad, lately burst
Out of the chambers of her leafy house,
Seeking for nuts for food and for her thirst
Such water as the woodland stream allows,
After the greedy summer has drunk up
All but a drain within the mossy cup.

Then I, beholding her, was still a space
And marked each posture as she moved or stood,
Watching the sunlight on her hair and face.
Thus with calm folded hands and quiet blood
I gazed until her counterfeited grace
Faded and left me lonely in the wood,
Glad that the gods had given so much as this,
To see her, if I might not have her kiss.

_The Idyll._

This is the valley where we sojourn now,
Cut up by narrow brooks and rich and green
And shaded sweetly by the waving bough
About the trench where floats the soft serene
Arun with waters running low and low
Through banks where lately still the tide has been;
Here is our resting-place, you walk with me
And watch the light die out in Amberley.

The light that dies is soft and flooding still,
Shed from the broad expanse of all the skies
And brimming up the space from hill to hill,
Where yet the sheep in their sweet exercise,
Roaming the meadows, crop and find their fill
And to each other speak with moaning cries;
We on the hill-side standing rest and see
The light die out in brook and grass and tree.

Lately we walked upon the lonely downs
And through the still heat of the heavy day
We heard the medley of low drifting sounds
And through the matted brambles found a way
Or lightly trod upon enchanted grounds
Musing, or with rich blackberries made delay,
Where feed such fruit on the rich air, until
We struck like falling stars from Bignor Hill.

Down the vast slope, by chalky roads and steep,
With trees and bushes hidden here and there,
By circling turns into the valley deep
We came and left behind the hill-top air
For this cool village where to-night we sleep,
A country meal, a country bed to share,
With sleepy kisses and contented dreams
Over a land of still and narrow streams.

The light is ebbing in the dusky sky,
The valley floor is in the shadow. Hark!
With rushing and mysterious noises fly
The bats already, looking for the dark
With blinking still and unaccustomed eye.
Now over Rackham Mount a steady spark
Burns, rising slowly in the rising night,
And pledges peace and promises delight.

Now from the east the wheeling shade appears
And softly night into the valley falls,
Soft on the meadows drop her dewy tears,
Softly a darkness on the crumbled walls.
Now in the dusk the village disappears,
Men's songs are hushed there and the children's calls,
While night in passage swallows up the land
And in the shadow your hand seeks my hand.

Only the glimmering stars in heaven lie
And unseen trees with rustling still betray
How all the valley lives invisibly,
Where dim sweet odours, remnants of the day,
Float from the sleeping fields to please and die,
Borne up by roaming airs, that drift away
Beyond our hearing, vagabond and light,
To visit the cool meadows of the night.

_The Pursuit of Daphne._

Daphne is running, running through the grass,
The long stalks whip her ankles as she goes.
I saw the nymph, the god, I saw them pass
And how a mounting flush of tender rose
Invaded the white bosom of the lass
And reached her shoulders, conquering their snows.
He wasted all his breath, imploring still:
They passed behind the shadow of the hill.

The mad course goes across the silent plain,
Their flying footsteps make a path of sound
Through all the sleeping country. Now with pain
She runs across a stretch of stony ground
That wounds her soft-palmed feet and now again
She hastens through a wood where flowers abound,
Which staunch her cuts with balsam where she treads
And for her healing give their trodden heads.

Her sisters, from their coverts unbetrayed,
Look out in fright and see the two go by,
Each unrelenting, and reflect dismayed
How fear and anguish glisten in her eye.
By them unhelped goes on the fleeting maid
Whose breath is coming short in agony:
Hard at her heels pursues the golden boy,
She flies in fear of him, she flies from joy.

His arrows scattered on the countryside,
His shining bow deserted, he pursues
Through hindering woodlands, over meadows wide
And now no longer as he runs he sues
But breathing deep and set and eager-eyed.
His flashing feet disperse the morning dews,
His hands most roughly put the boughs away,
That cross and cling and join and make delay.

Across small shining brooks and rills they leap
And now she fords the waters of a stream;
Her hot knees plunge into the hollows deep
And cool, where ancient trout in quiet dream;
The silver minnows, wakened from their sleep
In sunny shallows, round her ankles gleam;
She scrambles up the grassy bank and on,
Though courage and quick breath are nearly done.

Now in the dusky spinneys round the field,
The fauns set up a joyous mimicry,
Pursuing of light nymphs, who lightly yield,
Or startle the young dryad from her tree
And shout with joy to see her limbs revealed
And give her grace and bid her swiftly flee:
The hunt is up, pursuer and pursued
Run, double, twist, evade, turn, grasp, elude.

The woodlands are alive with chase and cry,
Escape and triumph. Still the nymph in vain,
With heaving breast in lovely agony
And wide and shining eyes that show her pain,
Leads on the god and now she knows him nigh
And sees before her the unsheltered plain.
His hot hand touches her white side and she
Thrusts up her hands and turns into a tree.

There is an end of dance and mocking tune,
Of laughter and bright love among the leaves.
The sky is overcast, the afternoon
Is dull and heavy for a god who grieves.
The woods are quiet and the oak-tree soon
The ruffled dryad in her trunk receives.
Cold grow the sunburnt bodies and the white:
The nymphs and fauns will lie alone to-night.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

_Ode on Beauty._

Infinite peace is hanging in the air,
Infinite peace is resting on mine eyes,
That just an hour ago learnt how to bear
Seeing your body's flaming harmonies.
The grey clouds flecked with orange are and gold,
Birds unto rest are falling, falling, falling,
And all the earth goes slowly into night,
Steadily turning from the harshly bright
Sunset. And now the wind is growing cold
And in my heart a hidden voice is calling.

Say, is our sense of beauty mixed with earth
When lip on lip and breast on breast we cling,
When ecstasy brings short bright sobs to birth
And all our pulses, both our bodies sing?
When through the haze that gathers on my sight
I see your eyelids, know the eyes behind
See me and half not see me, when our blood
Goes roaring like a deep tremendous flood,
Calm and terrific in unhasty might,
Is then our inner sight sealed up and blind?

Or could it be that when our blood was colder
And side by side we sat with lips disparted
I saw the perfect line of your resting shoulder,
Your mouth, your peaceful throat with fuller-hearted,
More splendid joy? Ah poignant joys all these!
And rest can stab the heart as well as passion.
Yea, I have known sobs choke my heart to see
Your honey-coloured hair move languorously,
Ruffled, not by my hands, but by the breeze,
And I have prayed the rough air for compassion.

Yea, I have knelt to the unpiteous air
And knelt to gods I knew not, to remove
The viewless hands whose sight I could not bear
Out of the wind-blown head of her I love.
Ecstasy enters me and cannot speak,
Seizes my hands and smites my fainting eyes
And sends through all my veins a dim despair
Of never apprehending all so fair
And I have stood, unnerved and numb and weak,
Watching your breathing bosom fall and rise.

Ah no! This joy is empty, incomplete,
And sullied with a sense of too much longing,
Where thoughts and fancies, sweet and bitter-sweet,
And old regrets and new-born hopes come thronging.
Man can see beauty for a moment's space
And live, having seen her with an unfilmed eye,
If all his body and all his soul in one
Instant are tuned by passion to unison
And I can image in your kissing face
The eternal meaning of the earth and sky.

_Song in Time of Waiting._

Because the days are long for you and me,
I make this song to lighten their slow time,
So that the weary waiting fruitful be
Or blossomed only by my limping rhyme.
The days are very long
And may not shortened be by any chime
Of measured words or any fleeting song.
Yet let us gather blossoms while we wait
And sing brave tunes against the face of fate.

Day after day goes by: the exquisite
Procession of the variable year,
Summer, a sheaf with flowers bound up in it,
And autumn, tender till the frosts appear
And dry the humid skies;
And winter following on, aloof, austere,
Clad in the garments of a frore sunrise;
And spring again. May not too many a spring
Make both our voices tremble as we sing!

The days are empty, empty, and the nights
Are cold and void; there is no single gleam
Across the space unpeopled of delights,
Save only now and then some thin-blood dream,
Some stray of summer weather;
The tedious hours like slow-foot laggarts seem,
When you and I, my love, are not together
And when I hold you in my arms at last
The minutes go like April cloudlets past.

And yet no hidden charm, no desperate spell
Can make these minutes longer, those less long:
No force there is that yearning can impel
Against the callous years which do us wrong.
No words, no whispered rune,
No witchery and no Thessalian song
Can make that far-off, misty day more soon.
The bravest tune, the most courageous rhyme
Fall broken from the bastions of time.

A long and dusty road it is to tread;
Few are the wayside flowers and far apart
And are no sooner plucked than withered,
When yearning heart is torn from yearning heart.
A weary road it is
And yet far off I see clear waters start
And clean sweet grass and tangled traceries
Of whispering leaves, that laugh to see us come,
And there one day ... one day shall be our home.

The day will come. O dearest, do not doubt!
It is not born as yet but I shall see
Some day the fearless sunrise flashing out
And know the night will give you up to me.
O heart, my heart, be glad,
Because the time will come at last when we
Shall leave all grief and unlearn all things sad
And know the joy than which none sweeter is
And I shall sing a happier song than this.

_Sonnets on Separation._

I.

The time shall be, old Wisdom says, when you
Shall grow awrinkled and I, indifferent,
Shall no more follow the light steps I knew
Or trace you, finding out the way you went,
By swinging branches and the displaced flowers
Among the thickets. I no more shall stand,
With careful pencil through the adoring hours
Scratching your grace on paper. My still hand
No more shall tremble at the touch of yours
And I'll write no more songs and you'll not sing.
But this is all a lie, for love endures
And we shall closer kiss, remembering
How budding trees turned barren in the sun
Through this long week, whereof one day's now done.

II.

The time is all so short. One week is much
To be without your deep and peaceful eyes,
Your soft and all-contenting cheek, the touch
Of well-caressing hands. O were we wise
We would not love too strongly, would not bind
Life into life so inextricably,
That the dumb body suffers with the mind
In a sad partnership this agony.
For death will come and swallow up us two,
You there, I here, and we shall lie apart,
Out of the houses and the woods we knew.
Then in the lonely grave, my dust-choked heart
Out of the dust will raise, if it can speak,
A threnody for this lost, lovely week.

III.

Is there no prophylactic against love?
Can I with drugs not dull the ache one night?
The rain is heavy and the low clouds move
Over the empty home of our delight
And find me in it weeping. You are far
And you are now asleep. The night's so thick,
Not even one stooping and compassionate star
Shines on us both disparted. O be quick,
Torturing days and heavy, turn your hours
To minutes, melt yourselves into one day!
... The cold rain falls in swift assailing showers,
Darkness is round me and light far away.
I'm in our well-known room and you're shut in
By strange unfriendly walls I've never seen.

IV.

Lovers that drug themselves for ecstasy
Seek love too closely in an overdose,
When the sweet spasm turns to agony
And the quick limbs are still and the eyes close.
I too, a fool, desired--to make love strong--
Absence and parting but the measure's brimmed,
The dose is over-poured, the time's too long
Already, though two nights have hardly dimmed
My lonely eyes with the elusive sleep.
O I'll remember, I'll not wish again
To go with ardent limbs into this deep
Sea of dejection, this dull mere of pain:
We'll love our safer loves upon the shore
And quest for inexperienced joys no more.

V.

Through the closed curtains comes the early sun,
First a pale finger, preluding the hand.
Outside more certainly the day's begun,
Where bright and brighter still the chestnuts stand,
Broad candles lighting up at the first fire.
I stir and turn in my uneasy sleep
But in my sorrow sleep's my whole desire.
About the still room small lights move and creep
Silently, stealthily on wall and chair,
Till to strong rays and shining lights they grow,
Which with their magic change the waiting air
And all its sleeping motes to gold and throw
A golden radiance on your empty bed,
Which wakes me with vain likeness to your head.

VI.

To-morrow I shall see you come again
Between the pale trees, through the sullen gate,
Out of the dark and secret house of pain
Where lie the unhappy and unfortunate.
To-morrow you will live with me and love me,
Spring will go on again, I'll see the flowers
And little things, ridiculous things, shall move me
To smiles or tears or verse. The world is ours
To-morrow. Open heaths, tall trees, great skies,
With massive clouds that fly and come again,
Sweet fields, delicious rivers and the rise
And fall of swelling land from the swift train
We'll see together, knowing that all this
Is one great room wherein we two may kiss.

VII.

We're at the world's top now. The hills around
Stand proud in order with the valleys deep,
The hills with pastures drest, with tall trees crowned,
And the low valleys dipt in sunny sleep.
A sound brims all the country up, a noise
Of wheels upon the road and labouring bees
And trodden heather, mixing with the voice
Of small lost winds that die among the trees.
And we are prone beneath the flooding sun,
So drenched, so soaked in the unceasing light,
That colours, sounds and your close presence are one,
A texture woven up of all delight,
Whose shining threads my hands may not undo,
Yet one thread runs the whole bright garment through.

_The Morning Sun._

Perhaps you sleep now, fifty miles to the south,
While I sit here and dream of you by night.
The thick soft blankets drawn about your mouth
Have made for you a nest of warm delight;
Your short crisp hair is thrown abroad and spilled
Upon the pillow's whiteness and your eyes
Are quiet and the round soft lids are filled
With sleep.

But I shall watch until sunrise
Creeps into chilly clouds and heavy air,
Across the lands where you sleep and I wake,
And I shall know the sun has seen you there,
Unmoving though the winter morning break.
Next, you will lift your hands and rub your eyes
And turn to sleep again but wake and start
And feel, half dreaming, with a dear surprise,
My hand in the sunbeam touching at your heart.

Persuasion.

Still must your hands withhold your loveliness?
Is your soul jealous of your body still?
The fair white limbs beneath the clouding dress
Are such hard forms as you alone could fill
With life and sweetness. Such a harmony
Is yours as music and the thought expressed
By the musician: have no rivalry
Between your soul and the shape in which it's drest.
Kisses or words, both sensual, which shall be
The burning symbol of the love we bear?
My art is words, yours song, but still must we
Be mute and songless, seeing how love is fair.
Both our known arts being useless, we must turn
To love himself and his old practice learn.

_Apology._

Have I slept and failed to hear you calling?
Cry again, belov'd; for sleep is heavy,
Curtaining away the golden sunlight,
Shutting out the blue sky and the breezes,
Sealing up my ears to all you tell me.
Cry again! your voice shall pierce the clumsy
Leaden folds that sleep has wrapt about me,
Cry again! accomplish what the singing,
Hours old now on all the trees and bushes,
And the wind and sun could not accomplish.
Lo! I waste good hours of love and kisses
While the sun and you have spilt your glory
Freely on me lying unregarding.
In the happy islands, where no sunset
Stains the waters with a morbid splendour,
Where the open skies are blue for ever,
I might stay for years and years unsleeping,
Living for divinest conversation,
Music, colour, scent and sense unceasing,
Entering by eye and ear and nostril.
Ah, but flesh is flesh and I am mortal!
Cry again and do not leave me sleeping.

_The Golden Moment._

Along the branches of the laden tree
The ripe fruit smiling hang. The afternoon
Is emptied of all things done and things to be.
Low in the sky the inconspicuous moon
Stares enviously upon the mellow earth,
That mocks her barren girth.

Ripe blackberries and long green trailing grass
Are motionless beneath the heavy light:
The happy birds and creeping things that pass
Go fitfully and stir as if in fright,
That they have broken on some mystery
In bramble or in tree.

This is no hour for beings that are maiden;
The spring is virgin, lightly afraid and cold,
But now the whole round earth is ripe and laden
And stirs beneath her coverlet of gold
And in her agony a moment calls...
A heavy apple falls.

_Bramber._

Before the downs in their great horse-shoes rise,
I know a village where the Adur runs,
Blown by sweet winds and by beneficent suns
Visited and made ripe beneath kind skies.
Light and delight are in the children's eyes
And there the mothers sit, the fortunate ones,
Blest in their daughters, happy in their sons,
And the old men are beautiful and wise.

There stand the downs, great, close, tall, friendly, still,
Linked up by grassy saddles, hill on hill,
And steep the village in unending peace
And to the north the plains in order lie,
Heavy with crops and woods alternately
And lively with low sounds that never cease.

_Now would I be._

Now would I be in that removed place
Where the dim sunlight hardly comes at all
And branches of the young trees interlace
And long swathes of the brambles twine and fall;
A space between the hedgerow and a road
Not trod by foot of any known to me,
Where now and then a cart with scented load
Goes sleepy down the lane with creaking axle-tree.

And there I'd lie upon the tumbled leaves,
Watching a square of the all else hidden sky,
And made such songs a drowsy mind believes
To be most perfect music. So would I
Keep my face heavenwards and bless eternity,
Wherein my heart could be as glad as this
And lazily I'd bid all men come hither
And in my dreams I'd tell them what they miss,
Living in hate and work and all foul weather.

And still my happy dreams would go,
Like children in a cowslip field
Chasing rich-winged insects to and fro
To see what rare delights they yield....

... O I am tired of working to be cheated
And sick of barriers that will not fall,
Of ancient prudent words too much repeated
And worn-out dreams that come not true at all.
I know too well what things they are that ail me;
To fight is nothing but to see
Thus at the last my own hand fail me
Is agony.

O for that corner by the hummocked marshes,
Visited hardly by the cynic sun,
Where nothing clear and nothing bright or harsh is,
Where labour and the ache of it are done,
Where naught is ended and where naught begun!

_Midwinter Madness._

A month or twain to live on honeycomb
Is pleasant--but to eat it for a year
Is simply beastly. Thus the poet spake,
Feeling how sticky all his stomach was
With hivings of ten thousand cheated bees.
O wisdom that could shape immortal words
And frame a diet for dyspeptic man!
But what of turnips? Come, a lyric now
Upon the luscious roots unsung as yet,
(Not roots I know but stalks; still, never mind,
Metre and sauce will suit them just as well)
Or shall we speak of omelettes? Muse, begin!
To feed a fortnight on transmuted eggs
Would doubtless be both comforting and cheap
But oh, the nausea on the fourteenth day!
I'd rather read a book by Ezra Pound
Then choke the seven hundredth omelette down,
Just as I'd rather read some F. S. Flint
Than live a month or twain on honeycomb.

O Ezra Pound! O omelette of the world!
Concocted with strange herbs from dead Provence,
Garlic from Italy and spice from Greece,
Having suffered a rare Pound-change on the way,
How rarely shouldst thou taste, were not the eggs
Laid in America and hither brought
Too late. I don't like omelettes made with fowls.
Take hence this Pound and put him to the test,
Try him with acid, see if he turn black
As will the best old silver, when enraged
At touching fungi of the baser sort.
(Forgive digression. These similitudes
Entrance me and I lose myself in them,
As schoolboys, picking flowers by the way,
Escape the angry usher's vigilance
And then, concealed behind a hedge or shed,
Produce the awesome pipe or thrice-lit fag
And make themselves incredibly unwell.)
My brain is bubbling and the thoughts will out,
But, Ezra Pound! they turn again to thee,
As surely as the lode-stone to the Pole
Or as the dog to what he hath cast up
(A simile of Solomon's, not mine)
And your shock head of damp, unwholesome hay,
Such as, the cunning farmer oft declares,
When stacked, will perish by spontaneous fire,
Frequents my dreams and makes them ludicrous.
Thou most ridiculous sprite! Thou ponderous fairy!
Bourgeois Bohemian! Innocent Verlaine!
I read in _The Booksellers' Circular_
That, in the University of Pa.
(Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.
--A line of normal pattern, Saintsbury)
You hold a fellowship in (O merciful gods!)
Romanics, which strange word interpreted
Means, I suppose, the Romance languages.
Doubtless they read Italian in Pa.
And some may speak French fluently in Ont.
But German, Ezra! There's the bloody rub,
It's not Romance and it is hard to learn
And Heine, though an easy-going chap,
Would doubtless trounce you soundly if he knew
The sorry hash that you have made of him.
But no! you're not for immortality,
Not even such as that of Freiligrath,
Enshrined, together with his _Mohrenfurst_,
In unrelenting amber. I hold you here,
In a soap-bubble's iridescent walls,
The whimsy of a long midwinter night,
And give you immortality enough.
Thou sorry brat! Thou transatlantic clown!
That seek'st to ape the treadless Ariel
And out-top Shelley in an aeroplane,
Take the all-obvious padding from your pants
And cut your hair and go to Pa. again
(Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.
Or even Oomp. if such a place exist)
And take with you the poets you admire,
Both Yeats and Flint to charm the folk of Oomp.
And write again for _Munsey's Magazine_
Of your good brother Everyone. (Just God!
Am even I of his relationship?)
So end as you began or even worse:
No matter, so 'tis in America.

_At a Lecture._

The lecturer took his place and looked
At the eager women's faces,
Then he cleared his throat and he jetted out
A stream of commonplaces.

He fondled Wordsworth and patted Shelley
And said with his hand on his heart
He would brook no interference from morals
In any matter of art.

He finished at last and strode away
Over the naked boards,
Erect in his conscious majesty
Back to the House of Lords.

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH

FROM SIDGWICK & JACKSON'S LIST

JOHN MASEFIELD

THE EVERLASTING MERCY.

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"Here, beyond question, in _The Everlasting Mercy_, is a great poem, as true to the essentials of its ancient art as it is astoundingly modern in its method; a poem, too, which 'every clergyman in the country ought to read as a revelation of the heathenism still left in the land.' ... Its technical force is on a level with its high, inspiring thought. It makes the reader think; it goads him to emotion; and it leaves him alive with a fresh appreciation of the wonderful capacity of human nature to receive new influences and atone for old and apparently ineradicable wrongs."--ARTHUR WAUGH in _The Daily Chronicle_.

THE WIDOW IN THE BYE STREET.

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"Mr Masefield is no common realist, but universalises his tragedy in the grand manner.... We are convinced that he is writing truly of human nature, which is the vital thing.... The last few stanzas show us pastoral poetry in the very perfection of simplicity."--_Spectator_.

"In 'The Widow in the Bye Street' all Mr Masefield's passionate love of loveliness is utterly fused with the violent and unlovely story, which glows with an inner harmony. The poem, it is true, ends on a note of idyllism which recalls Theocritus; but this is no touch of eternal decoration. Inevitably the story has worked towards this culmination."--_Bookman_.

THE TRAGEDY OF POMPEY THE GREAT.

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POEMS.

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1914 AND OTHER POEMS.

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"It is impossible to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism. These sonnets are personal--never were sonnets more personal since Sidney died--and yet the very blood and youth of England seem to find expression in them. They speak not for one heart only, but for all to whom her call has come in the hour of need and found instantly ready."--_Times_.

LETTERS FROM AMERICA.

With a Preface by HENRY JAMES, O. M., and a new Portrait. Extra crown 8vo, buckram, 7s. 6d. net.

This volume contains the series of descriptive articles contributed in 1913 by Rupert Brooke to _The Westminster Gazette_, four written from the United States, and nine from Canada. To these are here added an article on Samoa, and a study called "An Unusual Young Man," both of which appeared in The New Statesman after the outbreak of war.

POEMS OF TO-DAY: an Anthology.

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A selection of contemporary poetry made by the English Association and intended for the use of higher forms in secondary schools. It contains nearly 150 poems, representative of the chief tendencies of English poetry during the last quarter of a century, written by 47 authors, including Meredith, Stevenson, Kipling, Newbolt, Masefield, Bridges, Yeats, Thompson, Davidson, Watson, Belloc, Chesterton, Gosse, "A.E.," Binyon, Noyes, Flecker, and Rupert Brooke.

"The great merit of the selection is that the pieces are all genuine; whatever their ultimate value, they are at least free from the fetters of past tradition, and they therefore mark ... the beginning of a new lease of inspiration."--_Times Educational Supplement_.

"It is a book which any student of English literature will prize for its own sake."--_Scotsman_.

SWORDS AND PLOUGHSHARES. By JOHN DRINKWATER.

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"These lyrics, many of them inspired by the war, come from one of the most accomplished poets of the day."--_Times_.

POEMS. By ELINOR JENKINS. Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net.

"A new poet, whose poetry is all made out of pain and the beautiful religion of loss."--Mr JAMES DOUGLAS in _The Star_.

THE VOLUNTEER, and Other Poems. By HERBERT ASQUITH. Crown 8vo, 1s. net. _Second Impression_

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IRISH POEMS. _Second Impression_

FLOWER OF YOUTH: Poems in War Time. _Second Impression_

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THE TWO BLIND COUNTRIES. By ROSE MACAULAY. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net.

"Out of familiar things she contrives to draw a magic which sets all our definitions tottering.... This specific gift is so rare in modern poetry that we may well hail it with enthusiasm."--_Spectator_.

SELECTED POEMS. By LAURENCE HOUSMAN. F'cap. 8vo, 3s. 6d. net.

"The selections have been made from four previous volumes now out of print: Mendicant Rhymes, The Little Land, Rue, and Spikenard. There is hardly a stanza that is not felicitous in some way, and not one selection that could be spared."--_Morning Post_.

SOME VERSE. By F. S. F'cap. 8vo, 2s. net.

"Some of these pieces ... might almost have borne the signature C. S. C. Others ... have the mellow wit of the school of J. K. Stephen and the Cantabrigians on whom his mantle has fallen."--_Times_.

SIDGWICK & JACKSON'S MODERN DRAMA

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