THE MYSTERY

He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,

He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.

I did not pray Him to lay bare

The mystery to me,

Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
And His own face to see.

JOHN MCCRAE

John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 1872. He was graduated in arts in 1894 and in medicine in 1898. He finished his studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and returned to Canada, joining the staff of the Medical School of McGill University. He was a lieutenant of artillery in South Africa (1899-1900) and was in charge of the Medical Division of the McGill Canadian General Hospital during the World War. After serving two years, he died of pneumonia, January, 1918, his volume In Flanders Fields (1919) appearing posthumously.

Few who read the title-poem of his book, possibly the most widelyread poem produced by the war, realize that it is a perfect rondeau, one of the loveliest (and strictest) of the French forms.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

WALTER DE LA MARE

The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contemporary poetry, Walter (John) De la Mare, was born in 1873. Although he did not begin to bring out his work in book form until he was over thirty, he is, as Harold Williams has written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child.” De la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he uses thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves a grace that is remarkable in its universality.

De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in Peacock Pie (1913) he surprises us again and again by transforming what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly thrilling snatch of music. These magical poems read like lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. The trick of revealing the ordinary in whimsical colors, of catching the commonplace off its guard, is the first of De la Mare's two magics.

This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our consciousness. The Listeners (1912) is a book that, like all the best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and mystery seem soaked in the lines and a cool wind from Nowhere blows over them. That most magical of modern verses, "The Listeners," is an example. In this poem there is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, the thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the narrative itself—the half-told adventure of some new Childe Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe.

Some of his earlier poems and stories appeared originally under the pseudonym, Walter Ramal; his remarkable prose, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), is an addition to the permanent literature of great novels. Collected Poems 1901-1918 was followed by Motley in 1919 and The Veil in 1921.

THE LISTENERS

“Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:

"Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word," he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

OLD SUSAN

When Susan's work was done, she'd sit
With one fat guttering candle lit,
And window opened wide to win
The sweet night air to enter in;
There, with a thumb to keep her place,
She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face.
Her mild eyes gliding very slow

Across the letters to and fro,

While wagged the guttering candle flame
In the wind that through the window came.

And sometimes in the silence she
Would mumble a sentence audibly,
Or shake her head as if to say,
"You silly souls, to act this way!
And never a sound from night I'd hear,
Unless some far-off cock crowed clear;
Or her old shuffling thumb should turn
Another page; and rapt and stern,
Through her great glasses bent on me
She'd glance into reality;

And shake her round old silvery head,
With "You! I thought you was in bed! "

Only to tilt her book again,

And rooted in Romance remain.

SILVER

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she

peers,

Silver fruit upon silver trees;

and sees

One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

AN EPITAPH

Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she;
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
However rare rare it be;

And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?

CHICKEN

Clapping her platter stood plump Bess,
And all across the green

Came scampering in, on wing and claw
Chicken fat and lean:

Dorking, Spaniard, Cochin China,
Bantams sleek and small,
Like feathers blown in a great wind,

They came at Bessie's call.

THERE BLOOMS NO BUD IN MAY

There blooms no bud in May

Can for its white compare
With snow at break of day,

On fields forlorn and bare.