POETS AND POETRY.
SEEDS OF T13IE.*
Ms. Jour DaricirwATER's new volume contains nothing that is very remarkable, though there are many pleasant pieces in it. A poem called " In the Valley," beginning " Let none devout forgive my sin Who have not sinned as I ; . . ."
is more lively than his .usual vein, but perhaps a little mere- tricious. " The Samplers " is attractive, while the poem about a thrush, called " Malediction," is interesting and not particu- larly characteristic. The poet listens to the thrush's song in the spring, he is haunted by the thought of the bird's death, of how it will lie stiff-winged in a clotted ditch with lice among its feathers. He complains that images of death and decay pursue him like nightmares. " Portia's Housekeeping " is pleasant and well conceived. But Mr. Drinkwater is not by any means at his best in the lyric. I do not think that he is in-the narrow sense a poet at all—I mean he is not an independent, self-instigated " maker." He is an interpreter and a very fine interpreter ; his consciousness is the soil in which the seed can grow. He is, perhaps, the ideal reader of history, the reader who knows how to receive into himself the hint, the quickening element, the subtle indication that the insensitive reader misses. To this bare hint ho lends his own substanco and clothes what had else been incorporeal. But ho cannot, I believe, move of himself. This is no great matter, for he will never come to an end of all the queer buried facts that will cry out to so sensitive a listener. He will never lack grains of sand for his pearls. In another column the reader will find a review of his Oliver Cromwell. A. WILLIAMS-ELLIS.
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