IF ONE had never heard that William H. Davies had been a "Supertramp" he would know from the reading of his poems that he was a man who had in some way burst the gyves and come a little nearer to the native simplicities of life than most of us come. The innocence of Blake and the brooding of Wordsworth meet in his songs, the child and the seer become one. But though one constantly sees Blake looking over his shoulder, there is a fundamental, if subtle, difference in the work of the two. Blake's were much eyes oftener fixed upon angels than upon human beings, and the exceeding clarity of his vision has always about it something of the mystic and miraculous, whereas Davies has won to clear seeing and to the utmost transparency of words by deep knowledge of life and of nature. To be sure, he fled life; but he knew it, knew it and suffered it to the full and nature became to him an almost imperative refuge from the misery about him. His sympathy was too keen, he was not sufficiently insulated by self-interest to ignore the pain of the world, pain which was quick in him from experience as well as contact.. While Davies spent a part of his youth in America, one never ciates him with this country.

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*Collected Poems of W. H. Davies. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Poems 1908-1914. By John Drinkwater. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. Georgian Poetry, 1916-1917. London: The Poetry Bookshop.

Ardours and Endurances. By Robert Nichols. New York: Frederick A Stokes Company.

used it chiefly as a point of departure. He was always sailing to England and Scotland, working his way on ships, and who can forget the record of those voyages, particularly the time he shipped from Baltimore to Glasgow with eighteen hundred sheep:

The first night we were out at sea

Those sheep were quiet in their mind;
The second night they cried with fear
They smelt no pastures in the wind.
They sniffed, poor things, for their green
fields,

They cried so loud I could not sleep:
For fifty thousand shillings down
I would not sail again with sheep.

The tenderness of Davies for all the dumb creatures is unsurpassed in modern poetry. It is Blake's attitude, religious at heart, but made more tender and familiar by years of intimacy with the life of the fields and hedges.

The wren knows well

I rob no nest;

When I look in,

She still will rest.

The hedge stops cows,

Or they would come After my voice

Right to my home.

The horse can tell,

Straight from my lip, My hand could not Hold any whip.

Say what you like,

All things love me! Horse, cow, and mouse, Bird, moth and bee.

Mr. Davies almost as constantly

invites comparison with Wordsworth

as with Blake, but here, too, the es-. sential difference is no less marked. He has Wordsworth's purity and simplicity but not the august quality which was quite as native to the older singer. He is wholly the lyrist and two-thirds the child, never getting over the wonder of all that he sees. This is the secret of his charm, for charm he has to a degree not often matched in contemporary poetry. Something more than charm, too, is in these songs that hold the first freshness of joy, the almost mystic transport of nature. The Rain will serve as well as another to illustrate this:

I hear leaves drinking rain;
I hear rich leaves on top
Giving the poor beneath
Drop after drop;

'Tis a sweet noise to hear

These green leaves drinking near.

And when the sun comes out,
After this rain shall stop,

A wondrous light will fill
Each dark, round drop;

I hope the sun shines bright;
"Twill be a lovely sight.

Ecstasy of the sort that one feels in all of the nature poems of Davies is not essentially different from that which a mystic must feel in his moments of illumination, and is, indeed, a healthier thing. One arrives at God through withdrawal, through intense, self-centred contemplation, the other through beauty, through wonder, through finding God's handiwork good. No one can read the work of W. H. Davies without having his sense of beauty quickened and his reverence enhanced, and what priest or devotee could do more for him than this? When one reads these in the midst of war and songs world upheaval, they seem to belong to some innocent, forgotten period.

Could this song, for example, have been written since August, 1914? Sweet chance, that led my steps abroad, Beyond the town, where wild flowers grow

A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord
How rich and great the times are now!
Know, all ye sheep

And cows, that keep

On staring that I stand so long

In grass that's wet from heavy rainA rainbow and a cuckoo's song May never come together again; May never come

This side the tomb.

While these are the characteristic moods of W. H. Davies, one would know him but imperfectly who had not read certain of his London poems, such as The Heap of Rags, The Lodging House Fire, or The Sleepers. Here the hopeless misery of life among the very poor is so poignantly expressed that it haunts one. Where, in the work of Wilfrid Gibson, who has devoted himself until recently almost exclusively to depicting the same phase of life, does one find a picture that stays in the mind like that in the last stanzas of The Sleepers?

As I walked down the waterside

This morning, in the cold, damp air, I saw a hundred men and women Huddled in rags and sleeping there: These people have no work, thought I, And long before their time they die.

That moment, on the waterside,

A lighted car came at a bound; I looked inside and saw a score

Of pale and weary men that frowned; Each man sat in a huddled heap, Carried to work while fast asleep.

Ten cars rushed down the waterside,

Like lighted coffins in the dark; With twenty dead men in each car

That must be brought alive by work: These people work too hard, thought I, And long before their time they die.

The war has temporarily changed

all this in London and other large cities, the labourer is king; but the war will sometime end and then Society has this age-old problem before it.

POEMS, BY JOHN DRINKWATER

Two books could scarcely be more dissimilar than the poems of W. H. Davies and those of John Drinkwater. The magnetic personality that quickens one's mood the moment he opens the volume of Davies, is lacking in that of Drinkwater. One's first feeling about the book is that it lacks vibration, that it is static. This feeling does not wear away but it is modified somewhat by longer familiarity with the poems. In this book, Mr. Drinkwater has brought together the best of his work done between 1908 and 1914. It is a selection from several books published during that interval, a clearing of the decks for further action, for Mr. Drinkwater's best work is still before

him.

To this conclusion I am impelled by the fact that his most recent lyrics are his best, indeed the selections from his work included in the last issue of Georgian Poetry are much more fresh and delightful than the majority of those in his collected volume.

If, however, the book lacks somewhat in magnetic charm, it has the fine feeling and the ideality without which charm were an empty thing. It is set to a high mood throughout and the best English traditions have helped to shape it. One would know that Mr. Drinkwater was English, even if the English landscape did not appear as the background of the poems. Their feeling is altogether English, racial in the deepest sense. There is little of modernity as it manifests itself here, little of the so

cial passion, none of the influence of the revolutionary verse. Mr. Drinkwater's poems will not please the ultra modern, but they are true to the standards which he has set for himself and they have their own beauty, though it is often reminiscent of yesterday. The Soldier is one of the most direct utterances in the book and pertinent to the present time, though by antithesis:

The large report of fame I lack,

And shining clasps and crimson scars, For I have held my bivouac

Alone amid the untroubled stars.

My battle-field has known no dawn Beclouded by a thousand spears; I've been no mounting tyrant's pawn To buy his glory with my tears. It never seemed a noble thing

Some little leagues of land to gain From broken men, nor yet to fling Abroad the thunderbolts of pain.

Yet I have felt the quickening breath
As peril heavy peril kissed-
My weapon was a little faith,

And fear was my antagonist.

Not a brief hour of cannonade,

But many days of bitter strife, Till God of His great pity laid Across my brow the leaves of life.

GEORGIAN POETRY 1916-17

Mr. Drinkwater is, as I have said, represented with several selections in the new book of Georgian Poetry, covering the past two years, and the very quality that is lacking in the volume which he has gleaned from his earlier work, a native, spontaneous charm, is present in the later poems, for example, in this picture of The Cotswold Farmers, reaping their ghostly fields:

Sometimes the ghosts forgotten go

Along the hill-top way,

And with long scythes of silver mow

Meadows of moonlit hay,
Until the cocks of Cotswold crow
The coming of the day.

There's Tony Turkletob who died
When he could drink no more,
And Uncle Heritage, the pride
Of eighteen-twenty-four,
And Ebenezer Barleytide,

And others half a score.

They fold in phantom pens, and plough Furrows without a share,

And one will milk a faery cow,

And one will stare and stare,
And whistle ghostly tunes that now
Are not sung anywhere.

The moon goes down on Oakridge Lea,
The other world's astir,

The Cotswold farmers silently

Go back to sepulchre,

The sleeping watch dogs wake, and see No ghostly harvester.

Perhaps no poets love their land as do the English poets, and surely none have a more beautiful land to love. To draw one's heritage from the Cotswold country is in itself almost a patent of poetry, so might it inspire one to celebrate the intimate beauty of those midland hills. With a British poet, love of nature is love of England, love of the home land, and no poets are so consistently true to their country, so deeply, in dissolubly linked with it as are the English. Every shire has inspired beautiful verse, every locality has its association with some singer and takes on a romantic interest from his work. One never opens the book of an English poet without feeling this love of the very soil that bred him, and Georgian Poetry having the work of eighteen poets, makes this impression accumulative.

It is the third of the biennial anthologies brought out by Harold Monroe of the Poetry Bookshop in London, and taken in connection with the former ones, affords an ex

cellent opportunity to follow the general trend of English lyric poetry, to get a collective impression of it and to note its characteristics as distinguished from our own. The entire absence of vers libre, during the period when it was most in evidence here, the entire absence, indeed, of any revolutionary tendency in form-stands out as the most striking contrast with the work of American poets. Not less striking is the fact that Mr. Monroe continues to bring out the volume without including the work of any woman. In America this would not be possible, the book would be so manifestly unrepresentative and misrepresentative that the public would not accept it as authoritative. In this country women are doing work in poetry of such a quality that it not only equals but in many cases surpasses the work of men. This is not true, however, at the present time of any other country but America. There are isolated exceptions in all countries, but the representative work is being done by men.

This does not, however, excuse an anthologist from presenting the best that women are doing in his country, particularly when giving a biennial summary that is intended to follow the course of English lyric poetry.

Another observation that forces itself upon one in looking over the successive volumes of Georgian Poetry is the lack of freshness of theme in the work of the British poets. If it were not for the war, which introduces a new element, the present volume might quite as well have been written a hundred years ago. True, all the great themes are eternal, and when they are presented as Masefield presents them in his sonnets to Beauty, of which several of