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. TALL NETTLES Tall nettles cover up, as they have done These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. This corner of the farmyard I like most: COCK-CROW Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night Each facing each as in a coat of arms:- Seumas O'Sullivan James Starkey was born in Dublin in 1879. Writing under the pseudonym of Seumas O'Sullivan, he contributed a great variety of prose and verse to various Irish papers. His reputation as a poet began with his appearance in New Songs, edited by George Russell ("A. E."). Later, he published The Twilight People (1905), The Earth Lover (1909), and Poems (1912). PRAISE Dear, they are praising your beauty, The sky in a silence of wonder, I too would sing for your praising, Speech as the whispering grass, Or the silent sky. These have an art for the praising Beauty so high. Sweet, you are praised in a silence, Charlotte Mew One of the most amazing figures in modern poetry is Charlotte Mew. She has published only one book, yet that one small collection contains some of the finest poetry of our times. In 1916, The Farmer's Bride, a paper-covered pamphlet, appeared in England. It contained just seventeen poems, the pruned fruit of many years. Saturday Market (1921) is the American edition of this volume with eleven poems added. Had Miss Mew printed nothing but the original booklet, it would have been sufficient to rank her among the most distinctive and intense of living poets. Hers is the distillation, the essence of emotion, rather than the stirring up of passions. Her most memorable work is in dramatic projections and poignant monologues (unfortunately too long to quote) like "The Changeling," with its fantastic pathos, and that powerful meditation, "Madeleine in Church." But lyrics as swift as "Sea Love" or as slowly hymn-like as "Beside the Bed," are equally sure of their place in English literature. They are, like all of Miss Mew's contributions, disturbing in their direct beauty; full of a speech that is profound without ever being pompous. BESIDE THE BED Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast: So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be questioned or scolded; But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest. Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden The blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame sub due its breath: Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would quiver and redden, Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death. Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken, It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never very deep: I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of them dimmed suddenly and broken. This is only a most piteous pretense of sleep! SEA LOVE Tide be runnin' the great world over: 'Twas only last June month I mind that we Was thinkin' the toss and the call in the breast of the lover So everlastin' as the sea. Heer's the same little fishes that sputter and swim, Harold Monro Harold Monro, who describes himself as "author, publisher, editor and book-seller," was born in Brussels in 1879. Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in 1912 and his quarterly Poetry and Drama (discontinued during the war and revived in 1919 as The Chapbook, a monthly) was, in a sense, the organ of the younger men. Monro's poetry is impelled by a peculiar mysticism, a mysticism that depicts the play between the worlds of reality and fantasy. His Strange Meetings (1917) and Children of Love (1915) present, with an originality rare among Monro's contemporaries, the relation of man not only to the earth he rose from, but to the inanimate things he moves among. Even the most whimsical of this poet's concepts have an emotional intensity beneath their skilful rhythms. EVERY THING Since man has been articulate, Mechanical, improvidently wise, (Servant of Fate), He has not understood the little cries And foreign conversations of the small Delightful creatures that have followed him Not far behind; Has failed to hear the sympathetic call Reposeful Teraphim |