POETS AND POETRY.

MR. EDMUND BLUNDEN'S NEW VERSE.*

MR. BLUNDEN is rather a puzzling poet. He seems suddenly to dangle complete excellence before us and never quite to give it us except in an isolated verse or two. This is his second published volume, but he has not on the whole surpassed his

first, The Waggoner, except in the matter of having extended his range. Indeed, there are one or two poems in The Shepherd which are worse than anything in The Waggoner. "The Child's Grave," for example, seems to me a shocking

failure. It is an essay in the Wordsworthian manner ; he is trying to treat a genuine but sentimental subject with an extreme naturalness and simplicity. The resulting poem, alas, reads as if it had been written by Tommy Moore :—

"I came to the churchyard where pretty Joy lies On a morning in April, a rare sunny day ; Such bloom rose around, and so many birds' cries That I sang for delight as I followed the way.

Over the mounds stood the nettles in pride, And, where no fine flowers, there kind weeds dared to

wave ;

It seemed but as yesterday she lay by my side, And now my dog ate of the grass on her grave."

There are allusions to " white-lilied coffins," !irks taking wing,

• The Shepherd. By Edmund Blunden. London : Richard Cobden-Sanderson. net.2

alumwomen's gar-dens, violet eyes and-faithful hounds, and all to -dreadful hippity-hoppity rhythm. And yet not even this,

the worst poem in the book, is absolutely .disgusting. Here and there in an epithet or a piene of observation we see for a moment the real post, the man who has both eyes to see and power over words to set down what he has seen. It is this power of seeing things. of Zetting poetic material new minted, not worn and

thumbed out of hooka, that Mr. Middleton Hurry defines as style, and if this be the true definition, Mr. Blunden is one of the finest stylists of our epoch. For instance, there is a poem entitled the "March Bee." It is a spring evening and the poet is lying on the grass on boggy mountain side just where

the tilth stops. The bumble-bee comes, shunning the quaking wind flowers, and choosing rather to search the grass and the small wood-strawberry blossoms. The poet falls .into a musing

fit :—

"The magpies steering round from wood to wood, Tree-creeper flickering up the elm's green rind,

Bold gnats that revel round my solitude

And most this pleasant bee intent to find

The new-born joy, inveigle the rich mind

Long after darkness comes cold-lipped to one

Still hearkening to the bee, still basking in the sun."

Still better for its complete c,xactitude and freshness is the amusing "Poor Man's Pig." The old sow hears her master and grunts to get out of her sty :- ' Then out he lets her run ; sway she snorts

In bundling gallop for the cottage door, With hungry hubbub begging crusts and orts, 'Then like the Whirlwind humping 'round once more ;

Nuzzling the dog, making the pullets run,

And sulky as a child when her play's done." .

I think some of us were a little peevish when The Waggoner came out because Mr.Blunden had only treated his countryside in

her most ordinary moods, and peehaps to some of us -the most striking thing shout country places, or indeed about the natural world in general, is that even the most -comfortable Warwick- shire landscape puts -on, with dawn, snow, thunder or -moonrise,

something disquieting. These moods in The Waggoner Mr.

Blunden totally neglected, but the present volume gives us the clue to this -neglect. We have only to read the War poems to -know that it was clanged by no lack of sensibility. "War Auto- biography" and" Third Ypres : a Reminiscence" show Us that " Almswomen " or the " Film " were, as are so many of the more cheerful poems -of the present day, a refuge to a mind of intense sensibility, Which had been subjected to the intolerable -con- ditions of modern warfare. If such was the eaitse of the uniform calm, noonday light which shines over so many of his poems, it is a good augury for Mr. Blund.en's future. He is a poet whose

career all lovers of poetry will watch with interest.

A. Wmaaars-Ermas.