Born in 1867, Lionel (Pigot) Johnson received a classical education at Oxford, and his poetry is a faithful reflection of his studies in Greek and Latin literatures. Though he allied himself with the modern Irish poets, his Celtic origin is a literary myth; Johnson, having been converted to Catholicism in 1891, became imbued with Catholic and, later, with Irish traditions. His verse, while sometimes strained and overdecorated, is chastely designed, rich and, like that of the Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century, mystically devotional. Poems (1895) contains his best work. Johnson died in 1902 as a result of a fall.

MYSTIC AND CAVALIER

Go from me: I am one of those who fall.
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
In my sad company? Before the end,

Go from me, dear my friend!

Yours are the victories of light: your feet
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet:
But after warfare in a mourning gloom,

I rest in clouds of doom.

Have you not read so, looking in these eyes?
Is it the common light of the pure skies.
Lights up their shadowy depths? The end is set:
Though the end be not yet.

When gracious music stirs, and all is bright,
And beauty triumphs through a courtly night;
When I too joy, a man like other men:

Yet, am I like them, then?

And in the battle, when the horsemen sweep
Against a thousand deaths, and fall on sleep:
Who ever sought that sudden calm, if I
Sought not? yet could not die!

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere:
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds,
Dimness and airy shrouds.

Beneath, what angels are at work? What powers Prepare the secret of the fatal hours?

See! the mists tremble, and the clouds are stirred:
When comes the calling word?

The clouds are breaking from the crystal ball,
Breaking and clearing: and I look to fall.
When the cold winds and airs of portent sweep,
My spirit may have sleep.

O rich and sounding voices of the air!
Interpreters and prophets of despair:
Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come,
To make with you mine home.

Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson was born at Belmont Hill in Kent in 1867. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett (Browning's "Waring"), who was at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand. Dowson, practically an invalid all his life, hid himself in miserable surroundings; for almost two years he lived in sordid supper-houses known as "cabmen's shelters." He literally drank himself to death.

His delicate and fantastic poetry was an attempt to escape from a reality too big and brutal for him. His passionate

lyric, "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion," a triumph of despair and disillusion, is an outburst in which Dowson epitomized himself-"One of the greatest lyrical poems of our time," writes Arthur Symons; "in it he has for once said everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating and perhaps immortal music."

Dowson died obscure in 1900, one of the finest of modern minor poets. His life was the tragedy of a weak nature buffeted by a strong and merciless environment.

TO ONE IN BEDLAM

With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars,
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine;
Those scentless wisps of straw that, miserable, line
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares.

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine,
And make his melancholy germane to the stars'?

O lamentable brother! if those pity thee,
Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me;
Half a fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap,
All their days, vanity? Better than mortal flowers,
Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep,
The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours!

"A. E."

(George William Russell)

At Lurgan, a tiny town in the north of Ireland, George William Russell was born in 1867. He moved to Dublin when he was 10 years old and, as a young man, helped to form

the group that gave rise to the Irish Renascence-the group of which William Butler Yeats, Doctor Douglas Hyde, Katharine Tynan and Lady Gregory were brilliant members. Besides being a splendid mystical poet, "A. E." is a painter of note, a fiery nationalist, a distinguished sociologist, a public speaker, a student of economics and one of the heads of the Irish Agricultural Association.

The best of his mystical poetry is in Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894) and The Earth Breath and Other Poems. Yeats has spoken of these poems as "revealing in all things a kind of scented flame consuming them from within."

CONTINUITY

No sign is made while empires pass,
The flowers and stars are still His care,
The constellations hid in grass,

The golden miracles in air.

Life in an instant will be rent,

Where death is glittering blind and wild—
The Heavenly Brooding is intent

To that last instant on Its child.

It breathes the glow in brain and heart,
Life is made magical. Until
Body and spirit are apart,

The Everlasting works Its will.

In that wild orchid that your feet
In their next falling shall destroy,
Minute and passionate and sweet
The Mighty Master holds His joy.
Though the crushed jewels droop and fade,
The Artist's labors will not cease,

And of the ruins shall be made

Some yet more lovely masterpiece.

THE UNKNOWN GOD

Far up the dim twilight fluttered
Moth-wings of vapour and flame:
The lights danced over the mountains,
Star after star they came.

The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;

Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
eyes could never see.

Our

Stephen Phillips

Born in 1868, Stephen Phillips is best known as the author of Herod (1900), Paola and Francesca (1899), and Ulysses (1902); a poetic playwright who succeeded in reviving, for a brief interval, the blank verse drama on the modern stage.

Phillips failed to "restore" poetic drama because he was, first of all, a lyric rather than a dramatic poet. In spite of certain moments of rhetorical splendor, his scenes are spectacular instead of emotional; his inspiration is too often derived from other models. He died in 1915.

FRAGMENT FROM "HEROD"

Herod speaks:

I dreamed last night of a dome of beaten gold

To be a counter-glory to the Sun.

There shall the eagle blindly dash himself,

There the first beam shall strike, and there the moon

Shall aim all night her argent archery;