(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,
To set above his head?

And will you cut a stone for him-
A stone for him?" she said.

Three days before, a splintered rock
Had struck her lover dead-
Had struck him in the quarry dead,
Where, careless of the warning call,
He loitered, while the shot was fired-
A lively stripling, brave and tall,
And sure of all his heart desired . . .
A flash, a shock,

A rumbling fall. .

And, broken 'neath the broken rock,
A lifeless heap, with face of clay;
And still as any stone he lay,
With eyes that saw the end of all.

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.
But some poor fool had sped before;
And flinging wide her father's door,
Had blurted out the news to her,
Had struck her lover dead for her,
Had struck the girl's heart dead in her,
Had struck life, lifeless, at a word,
And dropped it at her feet:
Then hurried on his witless way,
Scarce knowing she had heard.

And when I came, she stood, alone
A woman, turned to stone:
And, though no word at all she said,
I knew that all was known.

Because her heart was dead,
She did not sigh nor moan,
His mother wept:
She could not weep.
Her lover slept:

She could not sleep.

Three days, three nights,
She did not stir:

Three days, three nights,
Were one to her,

Who never closed her eyes
From sunset to sunrise,
From dawn to evenfall:
Her tearless, staring 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:
But followed me, as I went in,
And sank upon a chair;

And fixed her grey eyes on my face,
With still, unseeing stare.

And, as she waited patiently,

I could not bear to feel

Those still, grey eyes that followed me,
Those eyes that plucked the heart from me,

Those eyes that sucked the breath from me
And curdled the warm blood in me,
Those eyes that cut me to the bone,
And pierced my marrow like cold steel.

And so I rose, and sought a stone;
And cut it, smooth and square:

And, as I worked, she sat and watched,
Beside me, in her chair.

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
The quiet, save the mallet-stroke.
With still eyes ever on my hands,
With eyes that seemed to burn my hands,
My wincing, overwearied hands,

She watched, with bloodless lips apart,

And silent, indrawn breath:
And every stroke my chisel cut,

Death cut still deeper in her heart:
The two of us were chiseling,
Together, I and death.

And when at length the job was done,
And I had laid the mallet by,

As if, at last, her peace were won,

She breathed his name; and, with a sigh,
Passed slowly through the open door:
And never crossed my threshold more.

Next night I laboured late, alone,
To cut her name upon the stone.

SIGHT 1

By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes
On colours ripe and rich for the heart's desire-
Tomatoes, redder than Krakatoa's fire,

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,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,

And let them all to my elder daughter.

The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises—
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,-

I shall give them all to my elder daughter.