I'm thinking you'd be glad,

Though the angels make your bed, Could you see the care we've had To respect you-now you're dead.

THE SPIRES OF OXFORD

I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The grey spires of Oxford

Against the pearl-grey sky.

My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.

The years go fast in Oxford,
The golden years and gay,
The hoary Colleges look down
On careless boys at play.
But when the bugles sounded war
They put their games away.

The left the peaceful river,

The cricket-field, the quad,

The shaven lawns of Oxford,

To seek a bloody sod-
They gave their merry youth away
For country and for God.

God rest you, happy gentlemen,
Who laid your good lives down,
Who took the khaki and the gun
Instead of cap and gown.
God bring you to a fairer place
Than even Oxford town.

Francis Brett Young

Francis Brett Young, who is a novelist as well as a poet, and who has been called, by The Manchester Guardian, one of the promising evangelists of contemporary poetry," has written much that is both graceful and grave. There is music and a message in his lines that seem to have as their motto: “Trust in the true and fiery spirit of Man." Best known as a writer of prose, his most prominent works are Marching on Tanga and The Crescent Moon.

Brett Young's Five Degrees South (1917) and his Poems 1916-18 (1919) contain the best of his verse.

LOCHANILAUN

This is the image of my last content:
My soul shall be a little lonely lake,
So hidden that no shadow of man may break
The folding of its mountain battlement;
Only the beautiful and innocent

Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake
Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake
Of churned cloud in a howling wind's descent.

For there shall be no terror in the night
When stars that I have loved are born in me,
And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair;
But this shall be the end of my delight:-
That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see
Your image in the mirrored beauty there.

F. S. Flint

Known chiefly as an authority on modern French poetry, F. S. Flint has published several volumes of original imagist poems, besides having translated works of Verhaeren and Jean de Bosschere.

LONDON

London, my beautiful,
it is not the sunset

nor the pale green sky
shimmering through the curtain

of the silver birch,
nor the quietness;
it is not the hopping
of birds

upon the lawn,

nor the darkness

stealing over all things

that moves me.

But as the moon creeps slowly

over the tree-tops

among the stars,

I think of her

and the glow her passing

sheds on men.

London, my beautiful,

I will climb

into the branches

to the moonlit tree-tops,

that my blood may be cooled
by the wind.

Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell was born at Scarborough, in Yorkshire, and is the sister of the poets, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. In 1914 she came to London and has devoted herself to literature ever since, having edited the various anthologies of Wheels since 1916. Her first book, The Mother and Other Poems (1915), contains some of her best work, although Clowns' Houses (1918) reveals a more piquant idiom and a sharper turn of mind.

THE WEB OF EROS

Within your magic web of hair, lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;
The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair;
The songs that turned to gold the evening air

When all the stars of heaven sang for joy.
The flames that burnt the cloud-high city Troy.
The mænad fire of spring on the cold earth;
The myrrh-lit flame that gave both death and birth
To the soul Phoenix; and the star-bright shower
That came to Danaë in her brazen tower

Within your magic web of hair lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world.

INTERLUDE

Amid this hot green glowing gloom
A word falls with a raindrop's boom

Like baskets of ripe fruit in air
The bird-songs seem, suspended where

Those goldfinches-the ripe warm lights
Peck slyly at them-take quick flights.

My feet are feathered like a bird
Among the shadows scarcely heard;

I bring you branches green with dew
And fruits that you may crown anew

Your whirring waspish-gilded hair
Amid this cornucopia-

Until your warm lips bear the stains

And bird-blood leap within your veins.