POETS AND POETRY.

POEMS (SECOND SERIES).*

IF, which heaven forbid ! we had to characterize with a single word the mental attitudes of poets, that word in the case of

Mr. Squire would certainly be detachment. Now, detach- ment is usually a secondary characteristic. It is caused by a quality in the mind for which we have no name in the intellectual sphere, but which in its social manifestation we call reserve or shyness. Such people seem to have a hedge round them which keeps them at a distance from their fellows and from direct contact with life. When they are men of intellect like Mr. Squire, and the quality is shown only in the sphere of some art, they are perhaps to be compared rather to men standing up on a little platform, such as is used by the umpire at lawn tennis or by the man who directs wanderers in the Maze at Hampton Court. These men are temperamentally onlookers,

and we shall detect in their works the typical faults and virtues engendered by their position. Why such men find themselves on their little detached points of vantage I do not know, very often I think it is caused by an unusual sensitiveness and an

early realization of men's follies and shortcomings. They shudder away from the stupidity and insensitiveness and vulgarity of such yahoos, and later, when wisdom has come to them, they are never quite able to make contact again. Such men obviously play a very valuable part. If they are poets or artists of any sort it is often they who acquire the greatest skill, for they are not detached because they don't feel strongly, but rather because they do ; the difficulty comes in in the expression of their emotion. Their drums are apt to be muffled drums, and, reali7ing how difficult it is going to be for them to express themselves and passionately longing to do so, they are willing to go to great pains in acquiring skill for the attainment of their ends.

There will be another effect of this coolness and detachment.

It will very often make for proficiency in a certain sort of humour —Mr. Squire, for instance, is perhaps the best living parodist— and it will often produce a fine reasoning and analytical critic.

But the " straight " expression of emotion is to such tempera- ments intensely difficult. When they do succeed in breaking their bonds, however, we get something exceedingly beautiful, like Mr. Squire's "You are My Sky." We shall hardly, however, get anything bad from such a writer, for he will possess what his unconscious instinctive colleague will not possess—the power of self-criticism. He may possibly in secrecy write badly, but I doubt if he does, I doubt if he even thinks badly; the sloppy or the otherwise unworthy is nipped in the very smallest bud. Actually, Mr. Squire's solo lapse is, I think, "The Lily of Malud." The most considerable new poem in the present collection is an account of the Oxford v. Cam- bridge Rugby football match. It is a minute diary of the sense perceptions and fleeting thoughts of an onlooker, and is written colloquially and in an informal measure with occasional rhyming. Some of the best lines in the poem are studies of the crowd. It might, by the way, be instructive to study the differences between Mr. Squire's and Mr. Masefield's treatment of the onlookers at a sporting event :—

" Oh, Lord ! What an awful crush! There are faces pals And strained, and faces with animal grins advancing, Stuck fast around mine. We move, we pause again For an age, then a forward wave and another stop. The pressure might squeeze one flat. Dig heels into ground, For this white and terrified woman whose male insists Upon room to get back. Why didn't I come here at one ? Why come here at all ? What strange little creatures we are, Wedged and shoving under the contemptuous sky !

• All things have stopped ; the time will never go by ;

We shall never get in ! . . . Yet through the standing glass The sand imperceptibly drops, the inexorable laws Of number work also here. . . ."

The reader notes the detachment. Mr. Squire does not in the least mind the accusation of being a moralizing Jacques, and has in this poem written that which many modern poets would have been afraid to write and will be shy to read. This in my mind is a sign of strength in Mr. Squire, and of weakness in those who will be shocked. Very effective in the poem is the alternate sense in the narrator of identity with the crowd and of separation from it. The onset of the early winter twilight, with the air grown blue and misty and the players only seen

* Poems (Second Serksl. BvJ. C. Solaro. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [Os. net.] -dimly as they drift away to a distant corner, matches lit by men In the stands on the opposite side of the ground beginning to show up as little yellow spurts of flame, all this is admirably given, with its psychologioal consequences.

At the end of the poem I think Mr. Squire makes a mistake. He takes the implicit comment of the early part of the poem a step further, and gives us not the fragmentary fleeting thoughts which were so effective earlier, but a whole slab of comment. I think he should have left this to the reader's imagination and not stated it explicitly, for it was all implicit in what he had written before. We should have got there all right, and now, by stating his comment in so many words, he has taken the fine edges off it ; he has tried to state what is really an attitude of mind too plainly, and has forgone the magic of poetry which he had used fully in the earlier part of the poem—its power of expressing the inexpressible.

I wish space allowed me to draw the reader's attention more fully to the fascinating qualities of "Winter Nightfall," with its intriguing use of assonance, rhyme and repetition, or" Meditation in Lamplight" (a good example of the category type of poem of which Mr. Squire is so fond and of which he has given examples in "Birds" and "The Moon"), and to the beautiful Chinese effects of Fen Landscape, and to the perpetual delights of that most beautiful poem, "A Far Place."

A. WILLIAMS-Eu.1s.