No one who had read The Hare of Wilfrid Gibson in 1912 doubted but that he had a rare gift of dramatic, musical self-expression, but in Hoops he has outgrown any puerilities of which he might then have been justifiably accused. Here again we have the passionate love of beauty, this time beauty of form, as desired by a mis-stitched, gnarled, crooked stableman and odd-job man attached to a travelling circus: I've always worshipped the body, all my life— The body, quick with the perfect health which is beauty, Lively, lissom, alert . . . The living God made manifest in man. Wilfrid Gibson seems to owe something of his easy, colloquial style in verse to Masefield's longer narrative poems; he seems-alone in this book-to be carrying on that tradition which threatened to become an obsession amongst our poetasters before the war. But Wilfrid Gibson has something to say; he does "see beauty in all its forms and manifestations"; he certainly does, more almost than all the others, "feel ugliness like a pain"; though he does not shut his eyes to it, as all those who have read his short volume of war poems know. Ralph Hodgson is a new-comer, and all true lovers of poetry will welcome him with open arms, for he has come to stay. Time, you old Gypsy Man, we regret to see, is not included in this volume; but that, after all, is obtainable in Poems of To-day. We certainly could not spare either of the two of his poems which are included. Many people prefer The Bull to anything in the book. It is a wonderful piece of realism; the beauty and horror of the jungle permeate every line; the whole poem is throbbing with life; it reads almost, as someone has said, as if it were written by one bull about another; we seem actually to see him Standing with his head hung down and now he is deserted, dying . . . and has to turn From his visionary herds And his splendid yesterday, Turns to meet the loathly birds Ralph Hodgson more than fulfils Lord Dunsany's definition of a poet, for he does more than know mankind as others know single men; he seems to know the world of beasts better than most of us know single men. But there are sure to be some to whom this poem will come as a tour de force; they will acknowledge its beauty of finish, the perfect workmanship that went to the making of it, but they will deny that such a subject is the end and aim of poetry. Let such readers turn to The Song of Honour; there will they find a universal hymn of thankfulness from all the world that should be sung on the hill-tops by every lover of Nature; it is the hosanna of all created things: The song of each and all who gaze Or see her dimly in a haze. heaven there. This toad seemed to him to stand for an emblem of his kings and priests; he loathed the false work of his colleagues that passed for true and so determined that his truth should not be doomed to march among this falsehood to the ages. So he chose a secluded spot and there fashioned his toad, and round it his people's gods, tigers, bats and owls . . . signs of sightless thought adventuring the host that is mere spirit"; his leopard became " fear in flight before accusing faith," his bull bore " the burden of the patient of the earth." 66 And other than the gods he made . . . the stalks All were deftly ordered, duly set . . Till on the wall, out of the sullen stone, A glory blazed, his vision manifest, His wonder captive. And he was content. " all In this poem we are made to feel all the wild, unsatisfied longings of the would-be creator, the ecstatic joy of him who builds for eternity, the pean of triumph of the man who has risen superior to all the little empty world of critics and out of the crucible of his mind has formed and perfected solid, substantial, lasting beauty. It stands as the victorious anthem of the poet of our era whose hand has found at last something worthy to do and is doing it with all his power, knowing full well that he is building for eternity and in the serenity of his might content with that. No more shall we hear the cry of the restless spirit of Brooke, no more will the sweet, exotic flavour of Flecker's Eastern poems lull our senses in these volumes; of these two we take our farewell here, and deep indeed is our regret. Widely differing as these poets were, they both attracted much the same lovers. Who could resist the metre of Yasmin ? But when the silver dove descends I find the little flower of friends Whose very name that sweetly ends I say when I have said, Yasmin. Though perhaps it sounds a grotesque simile, the triple rhyme in this metre strikes exactly the same chord as is struck by the noise of a railway engine when it is starting out of a station; it is attractive, though somehow it ought to be ugly. We hear the throb of the engine again in The Gates of Damascus : The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpenthaunted sea, The snow-besprinkled wine of earth, the white and blue flower foaming sea. Unlike most of his school, Flecker relies for effect on strange words and Oriental names; there is more of Keats in his beauty than in most of his younger contemporaries. As a master of metre and lyrical expression he stood high among his companions, as can be seen in The Dying Patriot : Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town, -Beauty she was statue cold-there's blood upon her gown. Proud and goodly kings had built her, long ago, With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there, No more beautiful poem has been written since the war began. And now he can sing to us no more. One more apostle of beauty is lost to us just when we needed him most. No one who had read The Hare of Wilfrid Gibson in 1912 doubted but that he had a rare gift of dramatic, musical self-expression, but in Hoops he has outgrown any puerilities of which he might then have been justifiably accused. Here again we have the passionate love of beauty, this time beauty of form, as desired by a mis-stitched, gnarled, crooked stableman and odd-job man attached to a travelling circus: I've always worshipped the body, all my life— The body, quick with the perfect health which is beauty, Lively, lissom, alert . . . The living God made manifest in man. 66 Wilfrid Gibson seems to owe something of his easy, colloquial style in verse to Masefield's longer narrative poems; he seems-alone in this book-to be carrying on that tradition which threatened to become an obsession amongst our poetasters before the war. But Wilfrid Gibson has something to say; he does see beauty in all its forms and manifestations"; he certainly does, more almost than all the others, "feel ugliness like a pain"; though he does not shut his eyes to it, as all those who have read his short volume of war poems know. Ralph Hodgson is a new-comer, and all true lovers of poetry will welcome him with open arms, for he has come to stay. Time, you old Gypsy Man, we regret to see, is not included in this volume; but that, after all, is obtainable in Poems of To-day. We certainly could not spare either of the two of his poems which are included. Many people prefer The Bull to anything in the book. It is a wonderful piece of realism; the beauty and horror of the jungle permeate every line; the whole poem is throbbing with life; it reads almost, as someone has said, as if it were written by one bull about another; we seem actually to see him |