RECENT VERSE.*

Mn. NOYES'S verse has always been full of the elemental stuff of poetry. He has courage, high spirits, imagination, melody, and our only complaint hitherto has been that be took himself a little less seriously than his talents demanded. His great gift of music degenerated sometimes into facile jingles, and his fancy was not always employed on worthy material. But in this epic of Drake he seems in all earnest to have come into his own. He has chosen the story of tire great circumnaviga- tion, with the tragedy of Doughty as the central incident and Burleigh as the malevolent power, and, with sundry twistings of history, he has made of this noble material what promises to be a noble poem. The austerity of blank verse is good for his Muse, and she comports herself with a dignity and restraint worthy of all praise. Mr. Noyes, indeed, has discovered a peculiarly stately and sonorous verse, which at • (1) Drake : an English Epic. Books By Alfred Noyes. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [68. net.]-(2) Holiday, and other Poems : with a Note on Poetry. By John Davidson. London : E. Grant Richards. [3s. 6cL net.-1-(3) Trumpet and Flag. By Edward Sydney Wee. London : G. P. Putnam's Sons. [3s. 6d. net.)-(4) .et Sonnet Chronicle, 1900-1906. By 11. D. Rawnsley. Glasgow : J. MacLehose and Sons. [2s. 6d. net.] -(5) Mattathias, and other Poems. By Frederic Atkinson. London : Longmans and Co. [4s. 6d. net. J-(6) Mendicant Rhymes. By Laurence Housman. London The Essex House Press. [121e. 6d.]-(7) Lyrics. By Gerald Gould. London : David Nutt. [1s. -(8) Poems. By Ella Young. Dublin : Hammel and Co.-(2) The Story and Song of Black Roderick. By Dora Sigerson. London : A. Moring. [3s. 6d. net.)--(10) Cassandra, and other Poems. By Bernard Drew. London : David Nutt. [3s. 6d. net. 1-

(11) Poems. By Harold Monro. London : Elkin Mathews. [1s. net.J-

(12) The Death of Leander, and other Poems. By John Drinkwater. Birming- ham : Cornish Brothers. [23. 6d. net.]-(13) How He Died, and other Poems. By John Farrell. Sydney Angus and Robertson. [se. net.1-(14) Old Bush Songs. Edited by A. B. Paterson. Same publiabera.-(15) When was ring, and other Verses. By Henry Lawson. Same publishers. f3s. 6d. net.]

the same time has the nervous passion in it which such a tale requires. The lyrics scattered throughout have all his old mellifluous sweetness, but it is a sweetness which in such a setting does not cloy. He has a Mamie skill in his use of geography, and nothing could be better than the way in which the romantic names of far-away places are woven into his descriptions. The storm on the Patagonian coast is finely done, and so, too, are Drake's torments of soul and the final scene of Doughty's execution. If we had space we should like to quote the song beginning "The same sun is o'er us," or that other lyric sung in the Palace, which has the true Elizabethan cadence. We will content ourselves with quoting as a specimen of Mr. Noyes's blank verse his apostrophe to England. In no modern poet that we know of does there burn a purer fire of devotion to the great past and the greater future of the English race :-

" Mother and sweetheart, England ; from whose brasst,

With all the world before them, they went forth, Thy seamen, o'er the wide uncharted waste, Wider than that Ulysses roamed of old, Even as the wine-dark Mediterranean Is wider than some tide-relinquished pool Among its rocks, yet none the less explored To greater ends than all the pride of Greece And pomp of Rome achieved ; if my poor sons.

Now spread too wide a sail, forgive thy son And lover, for thy love was ever wont To lift men up in pride above themselves To do great deeds which of themselves alone They could not ; thou hast led the unfaltering feet Of even thy meanest heroes down to death, Lifted poor knights to many a great emprise,

Taught them high thoughts, and though they kept their

souls Lowly as little children, bidden them lift Eyes unappalled by all the myriad stars That wheel around the great white throne of God."

That is noble verse. We trust, however, that Mr. Noyes will not think us hypercritical if we remind him that in the Mediterranean there are no pools that the ebb tide leaves dry, any more than there are in the Lake of Como or the Dead Sea.

The next poet on our list has a similar philosophy. On Mr. John Davidson the mantle of W. E. Henley has descended. He is not only an Imperialist, be is the sweet singer of Tariff Reform ; and he has an optimism so robust, a joy in life so masterful and overbrimming, that the most cold-blooded must fall a victim to his fiery persuasion. His soul, as he sings of one of his characters,- " Is bathed in light,

His heart for love athirst : Were he to die to-night

I scarce should call him cnrst."

His creed is that the best is yet to come, that truth and right must triumph, and that it is our business to clear away the debris of the past :- " I want an iron mace to smash

The world and give the peoples room."

All of which philosophy, and much else that is of high imaginative power, will be found in his new volume, Holiday, and more especially in the concluding prose essay on Poetry. Few more beautiful things have been said of great poetry than that "it makes men desire the fullness of time"; and, again, that it "fills the mind with a sense of everlastingness, and disposes the heart to undertake and to perform the labours of Hercules with ease and delight." Of the verse in the volume, we prefer the lyrics to the eclogues, though these are full of fine thoughts and melodious verse. Mr. Davidson's fault is that he is inclined at times to torture his fancy into conceits. He can draw wonderful little vignettes of landscape; but he can also describe Nature in a way so painfully " literary " that our teeth are set on edge. He is at his best when he has the simplest motif, as in such a delectable bunting-song as "A Runnable Stag," or a lyric like "Merry England." Colour, imagination, and fire are rarely absent from his lines, and above all he has the singer's supreme gift of the infallible ear.

With Mr. Tylee's Trumpet and Flag we are still among the Imperialists, but we have entered the domain of topical verse. Nearly all his subjects are of the present day, and the verses in consequence have occasionally an air of being written to Order. Not that Mr. Tylee is not excellent in this sphere-we know few better-but it is a sphere in which it is difficult now and then not to lose the poetic touch. One cannot feel the same emotion about every great public event, and the man who writes on so many will necessarily sometimes be artificial, and therefore weak. Such are the inevitable dangers of the field which Mr. Tylee has chosen to tilL Let us hasten to add that in such pieces as "After Vereeniging," the studies of " Bismarck " and "Rhodes," aud the elegy on the late Queen he has written as good topical verses as the present day can show. But we confess to thinking him at his best in pure fancy,—in "The Drummer" and "The Salute," in the charming " Balliol College Chapel," in his Somersetshire dialect poems, and in such a poem as "Sculling at Midnight," which Stevenson would not have disdained. Mr. Tylee's chief fault is that he is a little inclined to monotony both in rhythm and imagery. If we refrain from quoting from Mr. Tylee's volume, it is because so large a part of it has already appeared in these columns. This must also account for the fact that our notice is critical rather than laudatory.

We cannot well praise specifically verse which we have already endorsed by publication. Nevertheless, we think

of it as highly as we did when we published it. In two other volumes on our list the topical interest is the dominant one. Canon Atkinson's .Afaltathias is the kind of book which we expect from a thoughtful and scholarly man who is fond of putting his reflections into verse. In a strict sense it is scarcely poetry, though in the section devoted to sacred subjects it approaches very near it. Canon Rawnsley's A Sonnet Chronicle is a melodious diary of the chief events of the past six years. The sonnets show a high level of technical accomplishment, and sometimes a gleam of real poetry breaks through the verse ; but on the whole they appear to the present writer to suffer froin a defective inspiration, as, no doubt Canon Rawnsley would admit, all verse written under such conditions must suffer.

Of the poetry of the two following volumes there can be no question. Mr. Housman's Mendicant Rhymes are songs of the joy. of the earth, of simple folk, of beggars and fairies, and country tales :— "0 masters of the morning star,

So early up and gone so far !

Day's prime is past, and noon's in sight, But not where you shall sleep to-night; • Nor is the reckoning yet told Whether you there lie warm or cold.

• Little you care for cold or heat . When all the world is at your feet."

Mr. Housman seems to us most successful in his ballads, such as "Johnnie Kigarrow" or "On Lansdowne Hill." But he is capable, too, of exquisite lyrics with a Jacobean flavour, such as the one beginning :—

" I bid thee, dear, amend thy looks!

For thou hest beauty far more high Than man may claim till all the brooks And seas of love run dry."

Fine, too, are his devotional poems, "Love Importunate" and "Von Clamautis," and such a childish idyll as "Pax Britannica." He has caught much of that strange gift of phrasing, at once exquisite and simple, which passed with Herrick out of our literature. Mr. Gerald Gould's Lyrics derive something from the same sources, but more from Steven- son. For a young writer he shows a mastery of his art and a maturity of thought which are little short of marvellous. His verses are still apt to recall their models—" The Earth-Child," for example, reminds one of a famous poem in Songs of Travel— but there is nothing servile in the imitation, and he has ample material of his own. There is scarcely a line without charm, and there are pieces where a difficult thought is worked out with a freedom and precision which are rare enough in lyric poetry. Such are " Defeat " and the fine poem beginning " Thou art not to be pitied." He has an acute sense of natural beauty, and much of its magic has penetrated his verse, and he has caught, too, the romance of strange seas and far countries. From a writer with so fine a taste and so pure a fire it is reasonable to hope for great things. We quote one of his shorter lyrics :— " I gathered with a careless hand,

There, where the waters night and day Are languid in the idle bay,

A little heap of golden sand; And, as I saw it, in my sight Awoke a vision brief and bright,

A city in a pleasant land.

I saw no mound of earth, but fair • Turrets and domes and citadels, With murmuring of many bells ;

The spires were white in the blue air, And men by thousands went and came, Rapid and restless, and like flame Blown by their passions here and there.

With careless hand I swept away The little mound before I knew; The visioned city vanished too, And fall'n beneath my fingers lay.

Alt God ! how many bast thou seen, Cities that are not and have been,

By silent hill and idle bay."

The remaining books on our list we can only find space to notice very shortly. Mrs. Shorter's Story and Song of Black Roderick is a fairy-tale told half in prose and half in simple ballad verse. The tale has a good deal of beauty, which is somewhat impaired, in our opinion, by being drawn out into a fantastic ending. Miss Young's Poems are the product of the Irish renascence, and, like most of the work of that school, show more imagination than art. The best, to our mind, is the musical little poem called "A Roadway." Mr. Drew's Cassandra is ambitious work, spoiled by an imperfect taste. The concluding "Hymn to the Deity" is an incon-

gruous mixture of pagan and Christian conceptions, and such a line as "The perfect realisation of ideals" is impossible in

poetry. Mr. Harold Monro's Poems have good lines, but show little originality of conception. The same may be said of Mr. Drinkwater's The Death of Leander, where a trite didactic philosophy is expressed with considerable skill. After such work we turn to the three Australian volumes with a certain relief. They, at any rate, have life and freshness, and though they are imitative enough, the authors are too close to the life

they write of wholly to miss its accent. Mr. Paterson has made an amusing collection of old Bush songs, including one written by the late Lord Sherbrooke. They are the raw material of poetry, and it is curious to see the form they take

in the accomplished hands of Mr. Farrell and Mr. Lawson. A great deal of humour, a great deal of spirit, and a robust philosophy are the main characteristics of these Australian poets. When dealing with a more intricate life they are apt

to be banal and imitative ; but they give admirable expression to the simpler emotions of the wilds. Because they write of a world they know and of feelings they have themselves shared in, they are far nearer the heart of poetry than the most accomplished devotees of a literary tradition.