Another poet whose early death was a blow to English literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, November 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker at first found little to interest him but a classical reaction against realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a passion for technical perfection.

The advent of the war began to make Flecker's verse more personal and romantic. The tuberculosis that finally killed him at Davos Platz, Switzerland, January 3, 1915, forced him from an Olympian disinterest to a deep concern with life and death.

His two colorful volumes are The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) and The Old Ships (1915).

STILLNESS

When the words rustle no more,

And the last work's done,

When the bolt lies deep in the door,

And Fire, our Sun,

Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor;

When from the clock's last chime to the next chime Silence beats his drum,

And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time Wheeling and whispering come,

She with the mould of form and he with the loom of

rhyme:

Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,
I am emptied of all my dreams:
I only hear Earth turning, only see
Ether's long bankless streams,
And only know I should drown if

on me.

you

laid not your

hand

David Herbert Lawrence, born in 1885, is one of the most psychologically intense of the modern poets. This intensity, ranging from a febrile morbidity to an exalted and almost frenzied mysticism, is seen even in his prose works-particularly in his short stories, The Prussian Officer (1917) and his analytical Sons and Lovers (1913).

As a poet he is often caught in the net of his own emotions; his passion thickens his utterance and distorts his rhythms, which sometimes seem purposely harsh and bitterflavored. But within his range he is as powerful as he is poignant. His most notable volumes of poetry are Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through! (1918), and New Poems (1920).

PIANO

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the
tingling strings

And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our
guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child

for the past.

FORSAKEN AND FORLORN

The house is silent, it is late at night, I am alone.

From the balcony

I can hear the Isar moan,

Can see the white

Rift of the river eerily, between the pines, under a sky of stone.

Some fireflies drift through the middle air

Tinily.

I wonder where

Ends this darkness that annihilates me?

John Freeman

John Freeman, born in 1885, has published several volumes of pleasantly descriptive verse. The two most distinctive are Stone Trees (1916) and Memories of Childhood (1919).

STONE TREES

Last night a sword-light in the sky
Flashed a swift terror on the dark.
In that sharp light the fields did lie
Naked and stone-like; each tree stood.
Like a tranced woman, bound and stark.
Far off the wood

With darkness ridged the riven dark.

And cows astonished stared with fear,
And sheep crept to the knees of cows,
And conies to their burrows slid,
And rooks were still in rigid boughs,

And all things else were still or hid.
From all the wood

Came but the owl's hoot, ghostly, clear.

In that cold trance the earth was held
It seemed an age, or time was nought.
Sure never from that stone-like field
Sprang golden corn, nor from those chill
Grey granite trees was music wrought.
In all the wood

Even the tall poplar hung stone still.

It seemed an age, or time was none
Slowly the earth heaved out of sleep
And shivered, and the trees of stone
Bent and sighed in the gusty wind,
And rain swept as birds flocking sweep.
Far off the wood

Rolled the slow thunders on the wind.

From all the wood came no brave bird,
No song broke through the close-fall'n night,
Nor any sound from cowering herd:
Only a dog's long lonely howl

When from the window poured pale light.
And from the wood

The hoot came ghostly of the owl.

Shane Leslie

Shane Leslie, the only surviving son of Sir John Leslie, was born at Swan Park, Monaghan, Ireland, in 1885 and was educated at Eton and the University of Paris. He worked for a time among the Irish poor and was deeply interested in the Celtic revival.

Leslie has been editor of The Dublin Review since 1916. He is the author of several volumes on Irish political matters as well as The End of a Chapter and Verses in Peace and War.

FLEET STREET

I never see the newsboys run
Amid the whirling street,
With swift untiring feet,
To cry the latest venture done,
But I expect one day to hear
Them cry the crack of doom
And risings from the tomb,
With great Archangel Michael near;
And see them running from the Fleet
As messengers of God,

With Heaven's tidings shod
About their brave unwearied feet.

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried (Loraine) Sassoon, the poet whom Masefield hailed as "one of England's most brilliant rising stars," was born September 8, 1886. He was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, and was a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He fought three times in France, once in Palestine, winning the Military Cross for bringing in wounded on the battlefield.

His poetry divides itself sharply in two moods-the lyric and the ironic. His early lilting poems were without significance or individuality. But with The Old Huntsman (1917) Sassoon found his own idiom, and became one of the leading younger poets upon the appearance of this striking volume. The first poem, a long monologue evidently inspired by Mase