Since time began Of any human quality or stir Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. For ever rolling with a hollow sound. And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go, Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. Nor ever came a night Setting the stars alight To wonder at the moon: Was twilight only and the frightened croon, And waves that journeyed blind And then I loosed my ear. . . O, it was sweet To hear a cart go jolting down the street. WHAT TOMAS AN BUILE SAID IN A PUB I saw God. Do you doubt it? Do you dare to doubt it? I saw the Almighty Man. His hand Was resting on a mountain, and He looked upon the World and all about it: I saw him plainer than you see me now, He was not satisfied; His look was all dissatisfied. His beard swung on a wind far out of sight Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, "That star went always wrong, and from the start I was dissatisfied." He lifted up His hand I say He heaved a dreadful hand Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, "Stay, John Drinkwater Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 1882, is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln-A Play (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most of them meditative in mood. The best of his verses have been collected in Poems, 190819, and the two here reprinted are used by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers. RECIPROCITY I do not think that skies and meadows are A TOWN WINDOW Beyond my window in the night Yet there the frost and clean starlight Under the grey drift of the town The Warwick spring in flame and gold. And when the tramway down the hill There is about my window-sill The tumult of a thousand wings. J. C. Squire Jack Collings Squire was born April 2, 1883, at Plymouth, of Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and Cambridge University, and became known first as a remarkably adroit parodist. His Imaginary Speeches (1912) and Tricks of the Trade (1917) are amusing parodies and, what is more, excellent criticism. He edited The New Statesman for a while and founded The London Mercury (a monthly of which he is editor) in November, 1919. Under the pseudonym "Solomon Eagle" he wrote a page of literary criticism every week for six years, many of these papers being collected in his volume, Books in General (1919). His original poetry is intellectual but simple, sometimes metaphysical and always interesting technically in its variable rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 was published under the title, Poems: First Series. Another volume, Poems: Second Series appeared during Squire's visit to America in the fall of 1921. A HOUSE Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, The house, that house, O now what change has come to it. What imperceptible swift hand has given it A new, a wonderful, a queenly state? No hand has altered it, that parallelogram, So inharmonious, so ill-arranged; That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it was; No, it is not that any line has changed. Only that loneliness is now accentuate And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, And this mean edifice, which some dull architect Takes on the quality of that magnificent Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be, Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny, Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac And all a universe of nameless messengers And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear. From this great solitude of evening skies. So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around, Anna Wickham Anna Wickham was born in Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1883. She went to Australia at six, returned when she was twentyone, studied for Opera in Paris with De Reszke and suddenly, after a few years of marriage, became a poet. In a burst of creative energy she wrote nine hundred poems in four years. Her two first books were republished in America in one volume, The Contemplative Quarry (1921). The most casual reading of Anna Wickham's work reveals the strength of her candor. The poems could scarcely be put in the category of "charming" verse; they are astringent and sometimes harsh; gnarled frequently by their own changes of mood. Her lines present the picture of woman struggling between dreams and domesticity; they are acutely sensitive, restless, analytical. The very tone of her poetry reflects the disturbed music and the nervous intensity of her age. |