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 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, 1908–19, and the two here reprinted are used by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers. Seeds of Time (1921) is a lesser collection, too full of rhetorical generalities to say anything specific.

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.

John 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. His Collected Parodies was published in 1923.

A HOUSE

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully,
In clouds of hyacinth 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 twenty-one, 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 first two 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.

DOMESTIC ECONOMY

I will have few cooking-pots,
They shall be bright;

They shall reflect to blinding
God's straight light.

I will have four garments,

They shall be clean;

My service shall be good,

Though my diet be mean.

Then I shall have excess to give to the

poor,

And right to counsel beggars at my door.

THE SINGER

If I had peace to sit and sing,
Then I could make a lovely thing;

But I am stung with goads and whips,
So I build songs like iron ships.

Let it be something for my song,

If it is sometimes swift and strong.

ENVOI

God, thou great symmetry,

Who put a biting lust in me

From whence my sorrows spring,

For all the frittered days

That I have spent in shapeless ways,
Give me one perfect thing.

Another poet whose early death was a blow to English literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, November 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker at first found little to interest him but a classical reaction against realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a passion for technical perfection.

The advent of the war began to make Flecker's verse more personal and romantic. The tuberculosis that finally killed him at Davos Platz, Switzerland, January 3, 1915, forced him from an Olympian disinterest to a deep concern with life and death.

His two colorful volumes of poetry are The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) and The Old Ships (1915). Even when he faced emotional reality, it was through the “ escape" of an Oriental play, Hassan (1922).

STILLNESS

When the words rustle no more,

And the last work's done,

When the bolt lies deep in the door,

And Fire, our Sun,

Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor;

When from the clock's last chime to the next chime
Silence beats his drum,

And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time

Wheeling and whispering come,

She with the mould of form and he with the loom of rhyme:

Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,

I am emptied of all my dreams:

I only hear Earth turning, only see
Ether's long bankless streams,

And only know I should drown if

on me.

you

laid not your hand

D. H. LAWRENCE

David Herbert Lawrence, born in 1885, is one of the most intense of the modern poets. This intensity, ranging from a febrile morbidity to an almost frenzied mysticism, is seen in its highest colors in his