That has not thrown the Kiss Farewell

Sweet Youth, good-bye.

Now I suppose that lyric is not quite Elizabethan; in fact, I am sure that it is not. Lyric it certainly is.

I wonder what further concession we must make. Certainly Davies uses his verse as a vehicle for a philosophy as well as for communicating his mood. Certainly he does talk about things quite as often as he presents them, possibly more often; still he does now and again present men or things without comment: as, for example, a drunk who has done time watching school-house after school-house in the hope of finding his children:

And "Balmy" Tom is near as bad
A-drinking ale till blind:

No absent child grieves he, but there's
A dead love on his mind.

The poem is possibly sentimental. There are flaws in its technique. "But you know it's only about one thing in thirty I do that's any good," is the author's own summary criticism of his poems, so we may as well take the good with the flawed for a moment. Poet Davies is without any doubt, if one will but read enough of him for conviction. Despite the ancient speech, the speech that is at least as old as Tom Moore, there is here and there the fine phrase and the still finer simplicity. The last line of the above four, for example. I think I had better quote one poem which makes it necessary to "accept Davies" as a poet, after which we can at our leisure decide which verses we are going to hold as "good Davies." The poem is A Lovely Woman:

Now I can see what Helen was:
Men can not see this woman pass
And not be stirred; as summer's breeze
Sets leaves in battle on the trees.
A woman moving gracefully
With golden hair enough for three,
Which mercifully!-is not loose,
But lies in coils to her head close;
With lovely eyes, so dark and blue,
So deep, so warm, they burn me through.
I see men follow her, as though

Their homes were where her steps should go.
She seemed as sent to our cold race

For fear the beauty of her face
Made Paradise in flames like Troy-

I could have gazed all day with joy.
In fancy I could see her stand
Before a savage, fighting band,

And make them, with her words and looks,
Exchange their spears for shepherd's crooks,
And sing to sheep in quiet nooks;

In fancy saw her beauty make

A thousand gentle priests uptake

Arms for her sake, and shed men's blood.

The fairest piece of womanhood,

Lovely in feature, form and grace,

I ever saw, in any place.

Frankly I do not think that most of Davies' poems are so good as the two just quoted. Yet sometimes he uses the "classic-English" manner to perfection. In Dreams of the Sea, for example, are lines and strophes which I think we would accept without quaver or question if we found them in volumes of accepted "great poets":

And I have seen thy gentle breeze as soft

As summer's when it makes the cornfields run;

And I have seen thy rude and lusty gale
Make ships show half their bellies to the sun.

Thou knowest the way to tame the wildest life,
Thou knowest the way to bend the great and proud:
I think of that Armada whose puffed sails,

Greedy and large, came swallowing every cloud.

But I have seen the sea-boy, young and drowned,
Lying on shore and, by thy cruel hand,

A seaweed beard was on his tender chin,

His heaven-blue eyes were filled with common sand.

And yet, for all, I yearn for thee again,

To sail once more upon thy fickle flood:
I'll hear thy waves wash under my death-bed,
Thy salt is lodged forever in my blood.

Robustezza! This verse is not in the latest mode, but compare it with verse of its own kind and you will not find much to surpass it. Wordsworth, for instance, would have had a deal of trouble trying to better it. The sound quality is, again, nearer that of the Elizabethans than of the nineteenth-century writers. The philologist will find scarcely a Latin word in the foregoing verses: "Armada" is a proper name, and "gentle" is so tempered by mediaeval French. popular usage that one forgets its Latin derivation. I do not wish the reader to imply from this that the use of Latin words in English is taboo. Simply: certain effects are very often due to the omission of Latin words from the verse.

There is a resonance and a body of sound in these verses of Davies which I think many vers-librists might envy.

I am by no means attempting a full examination of Davies in this brief annotation. I think I have, however, quoted enough of him to show that he should be considered at least as much for his verses as for his better known prose, Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Ezra Pound

A MODERN SOLITARY

Ideal Passion-Sonnets, by George Edward Woodberry. Printed for the Woodberry Society.

George Edward Woodberry—a study of his Poetry, by Louis V. Ledoux. Poetry Review Co., Cambridge.

Mr. Woodberry's sonnet sequence has the frail beauty of perfumed summer days, days spent in an old garden, out of range of the winds of the world. The garden is formally patterned but softly overgrown-a sweet refuge for a sensitive solitary soul. In its paths, beside its mossy marble finials, a poet may live in the spirit and be indulgent of dream. He may see the light that never was, and celebrate a mystic marriage with a lady too fine and fair for flesh; and then, dreaming himself into etherealized passion, he may weave a fabric of poesy in her praise.

Indeed, the suggestion of the book is monastic. The poet took the vows early, and his life has been expurgated of all common things. He is monkish in both his distaste for the world and his rapture of spiritual emotion. Mrs. Henderson, four years ago in POETRY, characterized one of Mr. Woodberry's poems as "the tragic experience of a conventional soul facing unconventionality-life." But the attempt was not only tragic but abortive-Mr. Woodberry has never really faced life; he could not. And the present poem, recording a frank withdrawal, is perhaps the truest expression we have had of his delicate, bookish, meditative soul.

It has fineness of form and phrase, perfect finish, polish. It is an expert modern handling of old forms, old fashions,

old ideals. It has the pathetic and somewhat futile beauty of a fine lady of the old régime, revisiting the glimpses of the moon in these days of war and slang and bad manners, and feeling out of place as she confesses virginal ecstasies. Mr. Woodberry has never lived in his own time, and the penalty he pays is that nothing his art fashions can have quite the quality of an authentic original. No one today can quite "put over" a Louis XV Sevres plate or a Donatello altar, or a sonnet sequence of disembodied and ecstatic passion. The moment for those things is gone; our attempts at them have the flavor of a revival, a reproduction. Their sincerities are bookish sincerities, ardors for truth to type and period-not life but literature.

This sonnet, for example, is almost, but not quite, Sir Philip Sidney:

Full gently then Love laid me on his breast,

And kissed me, cheek and hands and lips and brow,
So sweetly that I do remember now

The wonder of it, and the unexpressed,

Infinite honor wherewith his eyes caressed

Youth in my soul, then ripening to the vow

That binds us; and he said to me: "Sleep, thou;
One comes who brings to thee eternal rest."

I know not how in that dread interval
My lady did herself to me make known,
So deep a slumber did upon me fall;
I woke to know her being in my own,
The nameless mystery whereon I call

When every hope hath from my bosom flown.

Sonnet XVII is a still franker expression of monastic rapture. Perhaps XXXI is the furthest of all from that mood-a fine tribute of gratitude for royal lineage: