RECEET VERSE:*

Responsibilities,' the ponderous polysyllabic title which Mr. Yeats has chosen for his last volume of poems, comes rather strangely from a poet whose irresponsibility has been one of his greatest attractions. It needs, however, to be read in the light of the motto; " In dreams begins responsibility," from an " Old Play," which follows. In his early letters tie-Mrs. IEnkson Mr. Yeats looked forward to the time when he would write from insight and, knowledge -as- well as Mtn • (1) Responsibilities, and 'otter Poems. By William Butler Yeats. London : Macmillan and Co. [Cs. net.!—(2) Between Doubting and Daring; By Jane Barlow. Oxford : B: H. Blackwell. [la. net.1—(3) The Pitgrintape. Pbems by Eric Shepherd. London : Longman' and Co. [3s. ed. net.!--(4) A Highland Regiment. By E. A. Mackintosh, MD., Lieutenant Seaforth Highlanders. London : John Lane. [Si. ed. net.!--+(3) Maple Leaf Songs. By Frederick Nivea. London : Sidgwiek and JaCkson. [1s. net.]—(0) Theophanies. A Book of Verses by Evelyn Underhill. London : M. Dent and Sons.- [35.'ed. net.]---erY Sonnets and other Fermi.; J..A. Fort. London : Chapman and Hall. [2s. net.]— (S) Tricks of the Traits. By J. C. Squire. London ; Martin Seeker, [23. 6d. net-I vision, and the subject-matter of many of these later poems shows at least a partial fulfilment of his forecast. But the result is not likely to enhance his repute as a poet. There is less glamour and magic in this than in any of his other volumes of verse. The war can hardly be held to blame, since all, or nearly all, the poems were written before 1914, and there is not a word about it save the brief note at the end of the book where he observes that the lines written in September, 1913, with the refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the _grave," need to be revised in view of the Dublin Rebellion of 1916, which, " whatever one can say of its wisdom, will be long remembered for its heroism." People may interpret Mr. Yeats's silence as they wiU ; but it is impossible not to be struck by the significant admission made in the notes that the three public controversies which have stirred his imagination in the last thirty years were the quarrel between Parnellites and Anti-Parnellitcs; the dispute over Synge's Playboy ; and the wrangle over Sir Hugh Lane's pictures. And though these controversies have moved him to passionate protest— as in the lines to Parnell, or those " To a Friend whose Work has Come to Nothing "—his verse has not gained in beauty by its appli- cation to the harsher purpose of satire or criticism. Ho finds it hard even ba the most friendly surroundings to forgive—he cannot forget-

" that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me —Seeing that Fame has perished this long while Being but a part of ancient ceremony— Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile."

And again in " The Fascination of What's Difficult he rails at " the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men." Most bitter of all is the confession that the exercise of his art has lost its supreme attraction :—

" All things can tempt me from this craft of verse s One time it was a woman's face, or worse—

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land ; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil When I was young, I had not given a penny for a song Did not the poet sing it with such airs That one believed he had a sword upstairs ; Yet would be now, could I but have my wish, Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish."

On the whole, it is a saddened, disheartened, and querulous Mr. Yeats that is revealed in this collection. Now and again be returns into his ivory tower and gives us echoes of the old magic, but for the most part the " fumbling wits and obscure spite " of his countrymen have jangled the sweet bells of his delicate Muse.

Miss Jane Barlow's verses 5 are varied in content, though the atmo- sphere is uniformly autumnal, the note subdued, and the diction literary, and even scholarly. There Ft, however, one notable exception—the verses headed " For Herself Alone," inspired by the Sinn Fein rebellion, in which the writer, a life-long lover of her country, passion- ately deplores Ireland's abandonment of a great opportunity :— " Since first o'er crested foam our sun's fire flashed to thee, Never yet was come a call to such fortune fair and high ;

Through a storm of strife it cried that thy share of life and crown Thou should'st win thee, Ireland, with long, with loved renown, Fast leagued with all the Nations of the Free, Where to have fought is fame, and glory it is to die.

Thy true sons, hearkening, left thee full many a hero's name, These all thou hest clean forgotten ; by evil arts misled To thy bitter woo halt followed, strayed from ancient honour afar, Basest foes whose steps defile the blood-stained ways of war— My heart's grief, Ireland ! this bides ever thy shame That thy faith thou hast broken, and hest betrayed thy Dead."

Mr. Eric Shepherd's verses,' in so far as they touch on the war, reveal little but horror and detachment. His sonnet on " The Front " is exclusively concerned with the soldier's thraldom to " the insensate lust of some machine," with the squalor and filth and misery of life in the trenches. A visit to a military hospital only inspires him with dismay

"That this vast place, so intricately vain,

This demon's joke, this strained futility With its huge sum of bravery and brain, Should all repair (but scarce) our own self-will With strife to keep what strife first strives to kill."

But whatever verdict may be passed on this partial view, or on his eulogy of Ireland, in whose " pure soul " he finds " that rarest joy, a facry-tale come true," there can be no two opinions as to the genuine poetic gift displayed in the beautiful ballad of the Nativity, the spirited lines on the mission of the poet, or the sketch of the ideal wife in " That not impossible she." The four literary sonnets, addressed to Stevenson, Turgenev, Jane Austen, and Montaigne, are, but for a few preciosities, admirable pieces of condensed appreciation.

The poems in A Highland Regiment 4 fall into the two familiar classes of those written before and during the war. Tho ante-bellum verses are wider in their range ; those dated from the trenches are stronger and more moving. They have none of the exhilaration of battle, but they breathe a spirit of endurance, they pay loving homage to dead comrades, and, coupled with a Highlander's hunger for glen and firth, they show his devotion to Oxford, the " strange old city for over young." Tereaes as) Neale—the heading of one—might bo taken as the motto of all : the fearless resolve of the soldier who has lost much of what makes

y ouch joyous, but against all odds is determined " to die as Fingers warriors died," and living or dead will return to wander in the " magical ways " of Oxford, or see the sun rising over Mallaig Bay.

Mr. Frederick Niven's Maple Leaf Songs,' many of which have already appeared in the Daily News, though written expressly to satisfy the nostalgia of Canadians, will appeal to all lovers of Canada. Intimate knowledge of the great West, love of the Rockies and the great rivers, the cry of the loon and the play of the chipmunk—all combine to lend these simple songs a charm which has already won for them a wide circulation among the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

Miss Evelyn Underhill's preoccupation with mysticism naturally colours most of her verse. As she puts it in the dedicatory poem to Theophanies," ramparts of "welded thought" form the defences of the prudent mind :- "Those ramparts they are buildcd tall ; But we a secret gate possess That opens in the outer wall What time its living latch we press A little emerald gate that sets us free Within eternity."

But these preoccupations, expressed in delicate and imaginative verse, do not blind her to the needs of the hour, and in " The Return," " Eng- land and the Soldier," " The Naval Reserve," and " Non-Combatants " we find the duties and privileges of heroic womanhood set forth in no

uncertain tones.

Some of Mr. Fort's spirited experiments in classical metres have appeared in the Spectator. We are glad to see them again in this little volume7 along with other pieces, patriotic, scholarly, occasional, or intimate, but all marked by sincerity of feeling and felicity of expression.

If poetry is a criticism of life, the higher parody can be justified as a genuine criticism of poetry. Mr. Squire has already proved him- self a master of the art of travesty, and his Tricks of the Trades is a pure joy. For hero we have no crude verbal mimicry, but an appro- priation of the spirit of the original, with just that amount of exag- geration and perversion required to pillory its weakness. As a sustained tour de force the burlesque on Mr. Masefield, " the poet in the Beek Streets," is perhaps the most deadly burlesque on the violence of tho new " School of Real Human Emotion " ; but we are not so sure that the parody of Mr. Belloo in his satirico-comic vein is not even cleverer. for it is a burlesque on a burlesque. The poets of the Celtic twilight. the writers of folk-songs, Sir Henry Nowbolt, Canon Rawnslcy, and Mr. Chesterton are all faithfully dealt with, and the first section of the book ends with two lacerating prose parodies of Mr. 'Wells and Mr. Shaw. Mr. Bilgewater's introspective narrative of his complicated relations with the Hon. Astarte Cholmondeley, an emancipated aristo- crat ; Mary Browne, the East End social worker ; and Cecilia Scroop, whose antecedents are indicated by asterisks alone, is almost uncanny ia its unerring exposure of mannerisms of thought as well as style ; and the devastating egotism of Mr. Shaw has never been more mercilcs-ly handled than in the fragment from his unwritten play of Mahon:et. Having thus shown us " how they do it," Mr. Squire in the second part of his book goes on to illustrate " how they would have done it." Wordsworth rewrites " The Everlasting Mercy," Mr. Masefield gives us his version of " Casabianca," Henry James revises the Church Cate- chism, Lord Byron takes liberties in the "Don Juan " stanza with " The Passing of Arthur," and, most brilliant of all, Gray rewrites his "Elegy" in the cemetery of "Spoon River." We cannot refrain limn quoting the following stanzas :- "Doubtless in this neglected spot is laid Some village Nero who has missed his due. Some Bluebeard who dissected many a meld, And all for naught, since no one ever knew.

Some poor bucolic Borgia here may rest Whose poisons sent whole families to their doom, Some hayseed Herod who, within his breast, Concealed the sites of many an infant's tomb."