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Since time began

Of any human quality or stir

Save what the dreary winds and waves incur.
And in the hush of waters was the sound
Of pebbles rolling round,

For ever rolling with a hollow sound.

And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go,
Swish to and fro

Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey.
There was no day,

Nor ever came a night

Setting the stars alight

To wonder at the moon:

Was twilight only and the frightened croon,
Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind

And waves that journeyed blind

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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,
You mustn't doubt it.

He was not satisfied;

His look was all dissatisfied.

His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the world's curve, and there was light

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,
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way;
And I will never move from where I stand."
He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"
And stayed His hand.

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
Moral, or that the fixture of a star
Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees
Have wisdom in their windless silences.
Yet these are things invested in my mood.
With constancy, and peace, and fortitude;
That in my troubled season I can cry
Upon the wide composure of the sky,
And envy fields, and wish that I might be
As little daunted as a star or tree.

A TOWN WINDOW

Beyond my window in the night
Is but a drab inglorious street,

Yet there the frost and clean starlight
As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town
The crocus works among the mould
As eagerly as those that crown

The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill
Across the cobbles moans and rings,

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,
In clouds of hyacinths the sun retires,

And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him
Keep but in memory their borrowed fires.

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied,
From that faint exquisite celestial strand,
And turn and see again the only dwelling-place
In this wide wilderness of darkening land.

The house, that house, O now what change has come to it.
Its crude red-brick façade, its roof of slate; .

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,
This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again,
And all men's energies seem very brave.

And this mean edifice, which some dull architect
Built for an ignorant earth-turning hind,

Takes on the quality of that magnificent
Unshakable dauntlessness of human kind.

Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be,
Yet imperturbable that house will rest,

Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny,
Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast.

Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac
May howl their menaces, and hail descend:
Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly,
Not even scornfully, and wait the end.

And all a universe of nameless messengers
From unknown distances may whisper fear,
And it will imitate immortal permanence,

And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear.
It stood there yesterday; it will tomorrow, too,
When there is none to watch, no alien eyes
To watch its ugliness assume a majesty

From this great solitude of evening skies.

So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around,
While life remains to it prepared to outface
Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries
May hide and wait for it in time and space.

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.

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