to the world, through Dunsany we have the Songs of Peace, written in the midst of war, and through him we are promised a volume of the posthumous poems, of which a considerable number were found.

Nothing could be more indicative of the temperament of Ledwidge than the slender volume, Songs of Peace. I have searched it vainly for any thing that could be called a war poem. Although written in the thick of war, it is one continuous memory of Ireland, one continuous longing for the blackbird, the hedges and the rainy veils of his beloved country. Now and then one gets an intimation that the poet realises to what stern business he has set his hand, as in these lines, In the MediterraneanGoing to the War:

Lovely wings of gold and green
Flit about the sounds I hear,
On my window when I lean
To the shadows cool and clear.

There is so much to do, so little done,
In my life's space, that I perforce did leave
Love at the moonlit trysting-place to grieve
Till fame and other little things were won.
I have missed much that I shall not retrieve,
Far will I wander yet with much to do.
Much will I spurn before I yet meet you,
So fair I can't deceive.

The Songs of Peace are to the last degree delicate; nothing of the fighting man appears in them. One is the more surprised, therefore, at the virile, soldier note that rings in these lines which will appear in the posthumous volume and which were published last month in the Touch

stone:

When I was young I had a care
Lest I should cheat me of my share
Of that which makes it sweet to strive
For life, and dying still survive,

A name in sunshine written higher Than lark or poet dare aspire.

But I grew weary doing well;
Besides, 'twas sweeter in that hell
Down with the loud banditti people
Who robbed the orchards, climbed the
steeple

For Jackdaws' eggs and made the cock
Crow ere 'twas daylight on the clock.
I was so very bad the neighbours
Spoke of me at their daily labours.

And now I'm drinking wine in France,
The helpless child of circumstance.
To-morrow will be loud with war.
How will I be accounted for?

It is too late now to retrieve
A fallen dream, too late to grieve
A name unmade, but not too late
To thank the gods for what is great:
A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart.
Is greater than a poet's art,

And greater than a poet's fame
A little grave that has no name.

What a spirit they all show, these young singers, who lift the cup of battle to their lips as if it were the Grail! Even more willingly, almost blithely, Charles Hamilton Sorley surrendered his life that spanned but twenty years. His volume, Marlbor ough, and Other Poems, is full of the soldier's dedicated gladness. It takes a high spirit to go to death with a song, but Sorley did it and exhorted his comrades to do it, in lines of hasty and immature technique but of the temper of heroes:

Cast away regie and rue,
Think what you are marching to.
Little live, great pass.
Jesus Christ and Barabbas
Were found the same day.
This died, that went his way.

So sing with joyful breath.
For why, you are going to death.
Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour.

Earth that never doubts nor fears,
Earth that knows of death, not tears,
Earth that bore with joyful ease
Hemlock for Socrates,

Earth that blossomed and was glad
Neath the cross that Christ had,

Shall rejoice and blossom too

When the bullet reaches you.

Wherefore, men marching

On the road to death, sing!
Pour your gladness on earth's head,
So be merry, so be dead!

Like Rupert Brooke, Sorley had a charm of personality that is likely to become a tradition. Many testify to it, as well as to his gifts, and at the annual dinner of the Poetry Society of America, John Masefield declared that had Sorley had time to develop these gifts we might have expected almost anything of him. Mr. Masefield also spoke of W. N. Hodgson ("Edward Melbourne") as one of the finest of the younger group who have paid the toll to war. Hodgson was the son of the Bishop of Ipswich and Edmundsbury and was a lieutenant in a Devon regiment. Refined and idealistic in temperament, his battle songs are consecrations, as a few lines of Before Action will show:

I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
Must say good-bye to all of this:-
By all delights that I shall miss,
Help me to die, O Lord!

con

One takes up book after book of these young poets who have fallen in action or who are still in the ranks, and is more than ever impressed with the fact that the whole emphasis of war, as far as the poets are cerned, has shifted to a spiritual basis. To compare the poetry of this war with that of any earlier one, is to see not only that the poet is using a new terminology, as befits the new technique of war, but that he is expressing a new reaction, a new mood. Formerly, when war was less terrible in its operation, it was romantic, it stirred the spirit of adventure. Open warfare was a superb spectacle and one's imagination thrilled to "battle's magnificently stern array" and to the "fiery mass of living valour rolling on the foe." Martial music, flags and banners, gorgeous uniforms,

resplendent cavalry, and all other externals of war, gave to it a glamour and covered its terrors with Romance. Now war is Realism; war is ugliness; war is horror. No longer in brilliant uniform, the soldier goes protectively coloured, like a creature of the earth, and burrows like a mole in the ground; he fires at an enemy he does not see; he is not inspired by martial music or banners; endurance must largely take the place of action; concealment must be his constant study and against bursting shrapnel there is no use to oppose his valour. Even when the charge comes, it is not that gallant encounter of open warfare with a fair field and no favours, but opposing skill in the use of ingenious instruments of destruction such as modern warfare has brought. It is ghastly and terrible in its physical features, and what has been the result? One no longer goes to war for romance, he goes for an ideal. The more realistic war becomes on its technical side, the more idealistic it becomes on its spiritual side. Only for the great inner purpose would anyone endure the outer horror; and the poets, who are the seers, looking wholly above the mod. ern operation of war, sing only of it as an instrument, only of its operation in the great ends of world destiny.

Instead of descriptive poetry, presenting the spectacle of war, we have interpretative poetry, giving the meaning of war; and since one in the immediate throes of a conflict can give little more than his own personal reaction to it, being too near for a focus, we have chiefly the personal spiritual effect upon the poet who undergoes the baptism of fire. To present this war in its physical sense, in the air, on the sea, and with all the terrible but marvellous instruments of its execution,-would require a Homer; and to interpret it in its psychological sense, with all the interplay of race and motive, would re

quire a Dante. Instead we have as its recorders youths just finding themselves and learning their art, but from these direct experiences we gain much more than from the more ambitious poems of those who write at second hand. Particularly is one impressed with this fact in looking over the various anthologies of war verse which have been issued in the past year. For example, in A Treasury of War Poetry, edited by George Herbert Clarke, an admirable collection containing most of the poems of note which have appeared during the war, one turns to the brief section called "Poets Militant," as one would turn from a clamorous place to a shrine. One after another the poets not in the war have moralised upon it, meted out judgment, and forecast an altered world, while quietly as a prayer in Gethsemane the poet face to face with death utters in song his dedication.

Professor Clarke's collection covers much the same field as that of Professor Cunliffe's Poems of the Great War, which antedated it considerably. Both contain the finest poems written up to the period of their publication, but Professor Clarke's Treasury of War Poetry, being issued later, has the advantage of greater timeliness. It also follows an excellent arrangement, presenting in sepa rate groups the poems pertaining to each country. Still a later anthology is A Book of Verse of the Great War, edited by William Reginald Wheeler and issued by the Yale University Press. It has to me less interest, owing to the fact that it is largely made up of work by non-militant poets, of whom nearly a third are Americans. As we are so lately in the war, we cannot in the nature of things have so immediate and vital an approach to it in our poetry. Then, too, Mr. Wheeler, who sends his manuscript from Hangchow, China, quotes certain poems which are now misleading, as The

Woman's Cry, by Edith Thomas, written at the very outset of the war, when Miss Thomas held very different convictions from those which she now holds. One in America could not escape knowing this, when her work constantly appears in the daily press. We are glad to see that Mr. Williams includes Olive Tilford Dargan's high-visioned and beautiful poem, Beyond War, and W. N. Ewer's searching Five Souls.

From all of these anthologies, one keeps coming back to the books written out of direct experience, and one of the most arresting of these is The Old Huntsman, by a young Jewish poet from India, Siegfried Sassoon, now fighting in the British army. Sassoon is a remarkable blend of mystic and realistic. Satire, humour, irony, keen thrusts at the waste and stupidity of war, alternate with

moods of consecration when nothing seems more desirable than to die for his Vision:

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe, And loss of things desired; all these must pass.

We are the happy legion, for we know Time's but a golden wind that shakes the

grass.

There was an hour when we were loth to part

From life we longed to share no less than others.

Now, having claimed this heritage of heart, What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

It scarcely does Sassoon justice to quote these lines which, as poetry, are of indifferent merit, compared with his celebration of Brother Lead and Sister Steel, or other poems which show the more sinister side of war; but, by his leave, I prefer to represent him in his more exalted, if less poetically inspired, moments. In Enemies one gets the point of view that Service constantly presents in the Rhymes of a Red Cross Man-that one is not at war with the individual and deplores

the fact that he must slay a brother man in making war upon a system. Evidently this poem is of a beloved officer or comrade:

He stood alone in some queer sunless place Where Armageddon ends; perhaps he longed For days he might have lived; but his young face

Gazed forth untroubled: and suddenly there thronged

Round him the hulking Germans that I shot

When for his death my brooding rage was hot.

He stared at them, half-wondering; and then They told him how I'd killed them for his sake,

Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men: And still there seemed no answer he could make.

At last he turned and smiled, and all was well

Because his face could lead them out of hell.

At the end of the book Sassoon has a poem to Robert Graves-son of Alfred Percival Graves-who has distinguished himself in the war and is himself a poet of ability. His book, Over the Brazier, is soon to be followed, as befits an Irishman, by Fairies and Fusiliers. At the Poetry Society dinner, previously referred to, Masefield told a story of Graves which shows the mettle of the young poet. After a battle in Flanders, where he was fighting, Graves was so severely wounded that when the stretcher bearers went out at night to search the field, they paused beside him and said, "There's no use bringing him in; he's dead." Whereupon, with the true fighting blood of the Irish, young Graves aroused and exclaimed, "No, I'm not dead and I'm dd if I die!" This is the spirit that will carry poet and soldier and race to victory.

One cannot leave our poets militant without a word of the sadness that has swept over the country at the death of Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, our Canadian neighbour, who has endeared himself to everyone by his exquisite poem, In Flanders

O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear Above their heads the legions pressing on,(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear

And died not knowing how the day had gone).

O flashing muzzles, pause and let them see
The coming dawn that streaks the sky afar;
Then let your mighty chorus witness be
To them, and Cæsar, that we still make war.

Tell them, O guns, that we have heard their call,

That we have sworn, and will not turn aside, That we will onward, till we win or fall, That we will keep the faith for which they died.

Bid them be patient, and some day, anon, They shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep,

Shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn, And in content may turn them to their sleep.

We all know the earlier lines, yet because they are likely to become Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae's monument and are words which we do not weary of recalling, I venture to put them once more into print:

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.

FOR Some years James Lane Allen has been lost to his public in a dim thicket of mysticism out of which, at times, has escaped the sound of his voice, mellowly spouting one knew not what. The only plain thing has been that a good story-teller whom we wanted had joined the swamis and minor prophets, of whom we had plenty. He is back again among us, still a trifle wild of eye, but with a smile on his lips, and a will to be human and intelligible once more. The Kentucky Warbler, from its title onward, directly challenges the interest of readers who twenty years ago were willing captives to the charm of The Kentucky Cardinal. It has, to be sure, its quality as parable or even as tract; but there are real people in it, and plenty of that demure humour we so sadly missed in the swami-phase of this writer's public expression. The little narrative (for this, like all Mr. Allen's later books, is of small compass) is of the chiselled cherry-tone order. No stroke is wasted in the picture of the odd yet somehow recognisable family that has produced the boy Webster: the father, sentenced for life at hard

*The Kentucky Warbler. By James Lane Allen. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.

The Tree of Heaven. By May Sinclair. New York: The Macmillan Company. Comrades. By Mary Dillon. New York: The Century Company.

Potterat and the War. By Benjamin Vallotton. New York: Dodd, Mead and Com

labour as a clerk in a bank, and getting what consolation he may out of self-mockery and a pose of indifference; the mother, just a mother; the little daughter, restless, assertive, modern, concealing her love for her brother under the appearance of malice; the boy himself, vaguely distrustful and rebellious against life, the life of narrow routine led by such men as his father, until a light is set to his feet and he sees the world before him. As for the means of his enlightenment, the professorial lecture on the ornithologist Wilson that fills the long second chapter, a third as long as the whole of the narrative proper-here I must feel that the writer's Southern love of platform eloquence gets the better of him. The gist of the matter might be given in a fifth of the space, and given more effectively for the purpose of the main fable. However, it is the romantic story of the Scotch weaver who after many failures as an ordinary citizen achieved greatness in the wilds, that rouses and inspires the boy Webster. Wilson becomes the guardian spirit of his dreams, and the rare little warbler first named by Wilson becomes the favourite object of his pursuit. Perhaps he is not to find it-we do not know; but the main thing is the search itself, and the bird is but a symbol. Ambi tion works in the boy, a plan for the future takes shape; meanwhile he has had a glimpse of the riches held for him by nature the interpreter. We part with him as he sets out once more to find the warbler: "Wholeheartedly, with a boy's eagerness, Webster suddenly took off his hat and ran down the middle of the gleaming white turnpike toward the