RECENT VERSE.*

YEARS ago Mr. Belloc published a squat little green volume of verse which has long been unprocurable. Since then his

prose has been sown with delightful lyrics, and discriminating people have been in the habit of collecting them ; for his verse has that haunting quality which makes echoes of it trouble a man till he has procured a text. At last we have Mr. Belloe's own selection, a rigorous selection, for all told there are less than fifty pieces. We should have preferred it larger; some sonnets, for example, might have been included from the earlier volume ; and we could have dispensed with a few pieces which have a political moral that, like much of Mr. Belloc's fiction, is either out of date or too obscure for the ordinary reader. But it is foolish to complain when so much of it is fine gold. Mr. Belloc has an infinite variety, but he is perhaps best as a. balladist. "The South Country," for example, is a true cry of the heart, and has the swiftness and directness of good folk-poetry. He has no self-consciousness, and, though his lines are full of odd tricks and reminiscences, there is such a rough zest of humour and pity and affection in them that the effect on the reader is one of sheer simplicity.

Equally good are " The Bivouac," with its splendour of place- names, and " The Death and Last Experience of Wandering Peter," where, as in The Path to Bonze, Mr. Belloc is awfully at his ease in Zion. But, for our own preference, we should choose the two ballads of friendship, " To the Banjo' Men Still in Africa" and the " Dedicatory Ode," which originally prefaced Lambkin's Remains. In the last we have all the

author's qualities by turns,—humour, ribaldry, satire, nonsense, good conversation, suddenly and easily passing to the lyrical

ery for lost days. No lover of Oxford is likely to forget

these lines "I will not try the reach again, I will not set my sail alone,

To moor a boat bereft of men

At Yarnton's tiny docks of stone.

• (1) VOWS. By H. Belloc. London : Duckworth and Co. [5s. net.]— (5) Ballads and Poems. By John Masefleld. London : Elkin Mathews. [2s. 6d. set.]--(S) Poems and Ballads. By Henry de Vere Stacpoole. London : John Murray. I_Ss. 6d. net.]— (4) Reaping the Whirlwind, and other Poems. By Rradby. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. [Ss. 6d. net.]—(5) Sanctuary, and other Poems. By R. G. T. Coventry. London : Elkin Mathews. [Sc. net.] —(6) The House of Piammetta a Sonnet Sequence. By Rachel Armand Taylor. Same publisher. [28. 6d. net.)—(7) The Troubadour, and other Poems. By Dora Sigerson Shorter. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [68. net.]— (8) Poems. By folio Radford. London : Elkin Mathews. [Sc. net.]—(9Y The nird Round, and other Songs and Verses. By Kathleen Conyngham Greene. London : A. C. Fifield. [1s. net.]—(10) Junta Salim,. By R. A. Knox. Oxford : Alden and Co. [Si. net.]—(11) Pool's Paradise. By Dam-Dam. London : Constable and Co. [3s. 6d. net.]—(12) Songs of the Happy Isles. By Maud Peacocke. London Whitcomb° and Tombs. [Se. 6d. net]—(13) South Africa, and other Poems. By A. Vine Hall. London : -T. Fisher Unwin. [Si.S ad. net..1—(14) Collected Poems. By Alfred Noyes. 2 vols. London: W. Bile w ood and Sons. [10s. net.]—(15) 'to : One Hundred Lyrics. By Bliss Carman. London: Chatto and Windus, sj, net.]

But I will sit beside the fire,

And put my hand before my eyes,

And trace, to fill my heart's desire, The last of all our Odysseys.

The quiet evening kept her tryst : Beneath an evening sky we rode, And passed into a wandering mist Along the perfect Evanlode.

The tender Evanlode that makes Her waters hush to hear the sound

Of waters mingling in the brakes, And binds my heart to English ground.

A lovely river, all alone, She lingers in the hills and folds, A hundred little towns of stone, Forgotten in the western wolds."

Next to the ballads come the songs, the beat clearly the " West Sussex Drinking Song," but close after, in a very different manner, the lovely verses in which the poet invites "The Influence of a Young Lady upon the Opening Year," or the child songs "Noel" and "Our Lord and Our Lady." And last come the satires : pleasant mockery, as in the parody of a " Newdigate " prize poem, or bitter wild satire, as in the " Verses to a Lord." In spite of the extreme cleverness of the latter, we think that Mr. Belloc's talent is best when it is urbane. The " Newdigate " is indeed a pure joy, a master- piece of the mock-heroic, which in our day has only been equalled by Mr. Belloc himself in his Modern Traveller.

Two other distinguished writers of prose have given us books of verse. Mr. Masefield's Ballads and Poems contains both old and new, and it is a pleasure to have in one volume these vagrom sea-songs, which have in them the very sway and surge of voyaging. There is always a tune behind the words, so that the reader often finds himself humming an accompaniment :- " Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road rails, pig-lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin-trays."

There you have music without one intrinsically musical word, Of all the ballads the most poignant is "The Emigrant," with its aching sense of loss ; and in a jewelled setting the same mood is caught in "The Harper's Song." But perhaps Mr. Masefield's high fancy reaches its best in " Fragments," which embodies the old idea that fallen Troy and the lost Atlantis became a city of the soul :—

" They knew all beauty—when they thought The air chimed like a stricken lyre, The elemental birds were wrought, The golden birds became a fire.

And straight to busy camps and marts

The singing flames were swiftly gone; The trembling leaves of human hearts

Hid boughs for them to perch upon.

And men in desert places, men Abandoned, broken, sick with fears, Bose singing, swung their swords agen, And laughed and died among the spears."

Mr. Stacpoole gives us in his Poems and Ballads a " Ballad of the Victory," a most gallant and stirring performance, and a good deal of that light accomplished verse we call "occasional." He is always the craftsman, always musical, and, except in the " Songs of Greece," which seem to us to miss the classical feeling completely, be achieves very skilfully the end he sets before him. For ourselves, we like best that little masterpiece of a children's song which he calls " The Mother-Land" :—

" Since God to folks of six or seven

Gave strength with which no king may strive, Since half the sweetness under heaven He gave to people under five.

We little knew what we were giving,

Methinks, when we gave play for strife And for the land where we are living The country where we played at Life.

O'er wooden trees and toy-church steeple Burns faintly each man's morning star, 0 Mother-land whose laughing people The dearest of all people aro !

To Death some fragment of thy stories

The beggar brings, and to thy song, Behind the dying Emperor's glories, His old tin soldiers tramp along."

Mr. Bradby'a Reaping the Whirlwind, and other Poems consists chiefly of a set of dramatic idylls on subjects connected with the French Revolution. The best are those in blank verse, which echo without imitating Browning. " 1789," " Ma rat's Sister," and " The Terror (from below) " are excellent both in content and manner.

Their prosaic simplicity gives a sharper effect than rhetoric. "The Connoisseur" is the grimmest of the pieces, for horrors are most dramatic when presented to us by one who sees no horror, only curiosities. There is more of the spirit of the Revolution in these little episodes than in most histories. Of the other poems we like best " Caiaphas " and "Neither Jew nor Gentile." Mr. Bradby has in a high degree the not very common gift of telling swiftly and clearly a tale

iu verse. The same talent is apparent in Mr. Coventry's latest volume, Sanctuary, and other Poems. In simple rhymed

verse of high technical perfection he gives us a number of apologues, full of delicate and carefully reasoned psychology.

All that he writes is distinguished and sincere ; but he reaches his highest in the title-poem, "Sanctuary," a religious meditation with something of the passion and grave reverence of the seventeenth century in it.

Of the four volumes by women poets, Mrs. Taylor's The House of Fiammetta is the most remarkable. Fiammetta is the type of woman who is neither Madonna nor Amazon, the " diaphanous " soul, as Pater would have said, who asks only to be the acolyte and clairvoyant of beauty. Her cry ie:—

" Take back this armour. Give us broideries.

. . . ...... Keep orb and sceptre. Give us up your souls."

This religion of beauty is set forth in heavily jewelled verse, which now and then recalls Rossetti. It has its technical faults, such as the flat close too often found in the sonnets, and the use of banal polysyllabic words. Sometimes the fashion is clemod, as in such a phrase as :- "Long, long ago through lanes of chrysoprase

The Dark Eros compelled his exquisite Evil apostle."

But at her best Mrs. Taylor gives us stately and sumptuous verse, touched often with a high imaginative beauty. Take such a sonnet as " The Idealist " " For such an one let lovers cry Alas I

Since passion's leaguer shall break through in vain To that cold centre of bright adamas-

Storm through her being, rapturous spears of pain ! Ye shall not wound that queen of gracious guile, The soul that with immortal trance keeps troth : For Helen is in Egypt all the while, Learning great magio from the Wife of Thoth. Throned white and high on rose-red porphyry, And coifed with golden wings, she lifts her eyes O'er Nile's green lavers where most sacredly The Pattern of the myriad Lotos lies,

Unto those clear horizons jasper-pale Her heavenly Brethren ride in silver mail."

Mrs. Shorter's The Troubadour, and other Poems contains good but unequal work. She does not seem to us successful with old ballad forms, for her simplicity smells of the lamp. The

title-poem, on the other hand, is an excellent example of the metrical conte, the narrative interest being sustained to the end in melodious verse. We like, too, some of the shorter pieces, such as "The Little White Rabbit" and "Unrest in Autumn." It is a pleasure to have a collection of Mrs. Radford's Poems, those subtle interpretations of intangible moods and thoughts. No poet of our day is so skilled in catching the nuances of feeling and fancy, and her gentle, sober verse is a perfect medium of expression. "In Summer

Days is a good instance of how poignant she can be without any of the common artifices of pathos. Miss Kathleen Conyngham Greene's slim volume is full of promise. There is a quaint magic in her little snatches of song, a new kind of cadence, the glamour of a fresh and original fancy. She has no conventional phrases, and no liking for the rhetoric which ensnares so often the young poet. Such a piece as " The Last House" is a fine idea worked out austerely and impressively.

Very good too, in a different style, is " Johnny." Miss Conyngham Greene's work deserves to be followed by all lovers of poetry.

Mr. R.. A. Knox's Juxta Salices is a volume of parodies and squibs in verse and prose, the true flavour of which will be won only by those who know Eton and Balliol. "A Decalogue Symposium," an admirable performance which will give joy to the initiate, is so reminiscent of Balliol, and the most recent Balliol, as to be Coptic to the ordinary reader. But any one can appreciate the excellence of " A Paraclausithyron,"

a better imitation of Rossetti's ballad than even H. D. Traill's famous " Mother Carey, Mother." Of the others, we like beat in verse the " Special Dedication " and in prose "On Politics," a sketch which is only too true. A Fool's Paradise, by " Dum-Dum," is a collection of light- hearted verse on many topics, the merits of which are its metrical ease and its admirable management of the anti- climax. He brings us up to the verge of gravity, and sheers off into farce with the deftest tarn. He is so good a crafts- man that it is difficult to say that one piece is better than another, but if we had to select we should choose " On Delia Singing." Miss Maud Peacocke's Songs of the Happy Isles is a fluent volume of verse with the fresh full music we are beginning to associate with the Antipodes. Her passionate love of New Zealand sights and sounds gives all her poems a ring of sincerity, and at her best she has a true power of fancy and reflection. Mr. Vine Hall's South Africa, and other Poems is scarcely so successful. His longer pieces tend to a kind of jingling rhetoric, and he seems to us best in such sonnets as " The Brothers " and " Two Novembers."

We are glad to be able to congratulate Mr. Alfred Noyes on a distinction which rarely falls to so young a poet, a collected edition of his works. It is pleasant to have in two compact volumes so fine an epic as "Drake" and so much of the best lyrical poetry of our day. Mr. Bliss Carman's One Hundred Lyrics is a bold attempt to construct from lines or fragments of lines the lost poems of Sappho. It is a brilliant performance, as we should expect from so accomplished a poet. Now and then he seems to us to have forsaken the Sapphic tradition; but he has written many beautiful verses, and has succeeded somehow in giving them the indefinable air of being translations from some noble originaL