(see Preface) being imitative in manner and sentimentally romantic in tone. With The Stonefolds (1907) and Daily Bread (1910), Gibson executed a complete right-about-face and, with dramatic brevity, wrote a series of poems mirroring the dreams, pursuits and fears of common humanity. Fires (1912) marks an advance in technique and power. And though in Livelihood (1917) Gibson seems to be theatricalizing and merely exploiting his working-people, his later lyrics frequently recapture the veracity. 1 THE STONE 1 "And will you cut a stone for him, And will you cut a stone for him- Three days before, a splintered rock A rumbling fall. . And, broken 'neath the broken rock, I went to break the news to her; And I could hear my own heart beat From Fires by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright, 1912, by The Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission of the pub lishers. With dread of what my lips might say. And when I came, she stood, alone Because her heart was dead, She could not sleep. Three days, three nights, Three days, three nights, Who never closed her eyes That seeing naught, saw all. The fourth night when I came from work, I found her at my door. "And will you cut a stone for him?" She said and spoke no more: And fixed her grey eyes on my face, And, as she waited patiently, I could not bear to feel Those still, grey eyes that followed me, Those eyes that sucked the breath from me And so I rose, and sought a stone; And, as I worked, she sat and watched, Night after night, by candlelight, I cut her lover's name: Night after night, so still and white, And like a ghost she came; And sat beside me in her chair; And watched with eyes aflame. She eyed each stroke; And hardly stirred: She never spoke A single word: And not a sound or murmur broke She watched, with bloodless lips apart, And silent, indrawn breath: Death cut still deeper in her heart: And when at length the job was done, As if, at last, her peace were won, She breathed his name; and, with a sigh, Next night I laboured late, alone, SIGHT 1 By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes Oranges like old sunsets over Tyre, And apples golden-green as the glades of Paradise. And as I lingered, lost in divine delight, My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight And all youth's lively senses keen and quick . . When suddenly, behind me in the night, I heard the tapping of a blind man's stick. 1 From Borderlands and Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright, 1915, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. Edward Thomas, one of the little-known but most individual of modern English poets, was born in 1878. For many years before he turned to verse, Thomas had a large following as a critic and author of travel-books, biographies, pot-boilers. It needed something foreign to stir and animate what was native in him. So when Robert Frost, the New England poet, went abroad in 1912 for two years and became an intimate of Thomas's, the English critic began to write poetry. Loving, like Frost, the minutia of existence, the quaint and casual turn of ordinary life, he caught the magic of the English countryside in its unpoeticized quietude. It is not disillusion, it is rather an absence of illusion. Poems (1917), dedicated to Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's fidelity to little things, things as unglorified as the unfreezing of the "rock-like mud," a child's path, a list of quaint-sounding villages, birds' nests uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty nettles. His lines glow with a deep reverence for the soil. Thomas was killed at Arras, at an observatory outpost, on Easter Monday, 1917. IF I SHOULD EVER BY CHANCE If I should ever by chance grow rich I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, And let them all to my elder daughter. The rent I shall ask of her will be only I shall give them all to my elder daughter. |