TE 1110RA'.FORIUM SAIXTO IN a recent article, Mr. Leonard Woolf

enjoined on the poets the necessity for a moratorium of fifteen years. Unmindful for the moment of the indiscriminate hospitalities of the Hogarth Preis to all sorts of benighted or bedawned adventurers, with a sweet reasonableness, and most amiable melancholy, Mr. Woolf bade the bards to become, with one great refusal, a hu0 frieze of the Sleeping Beauty. But looking out as we do over the tempestuous surges of worthless fiction, abominable biography and heaven knows what else, the poets may perhaps be fOrgiven a little indignation at this proposal, not least when they reflect that the joint sales of all the books of verse pub; lisped in 1925 were probably less than that of " Masterson.' We -are indignant I say—and yet—. .

V1 ell, here are four books of verse, all in a measure competent . and!Mie by 11,Ktet Oteally,s9.established that hedoes_got even need to acknowledge the names of the journals in which his poems have appeared. Competent, but, alas ! is there in any one of them a trace of the real singing-ecstasy, the impulse which can none other, and will none other ? I confess that I have looked in vain in all four books, and with a real sense of disappoint- ment in Arr. Frank-Kendon's case. Mr. KentiOn's first book of verse was dangerously accomplished, but it hinted at a possibility that the poet would lay aside-his gentleness, and his quiet self-control for something with the tiger-snarl of angry beauty in it. But in Arguments and Emblems, I cannot hear the -battle-cry Of poetry. There is charm—oh, always charm— as for example : " 0 easily surrendered hours,

How pleasant has Time's thieving been "

and beautiful control of rhythm, as :

" Into thy colour, rose, thy delicate Petals, rose, thy sweetness, I can breathe "

and an epigrammatic utterance laid up in the lavender of verse, as : -

" And lifts a wing, and steals another day, And gives delight, and takes delight away."

All these things are Mr. Kendon's, and all the time that the still small voice was speaking I listened for even the hint of the storm. But I never heard it. .

It is perhaps less surprising that Miss Stuart's Sword Songs, being, as they were, written for a competition, lack the breath- less agony of true poetic vision. She assures us, it is true, that froth a child she was taught to love the lore of the sword. But it is doubtful whether that love can be a first-hand one. For into her vision of the sword, Miss Stuart, who has written with exquisite sensibility 'of the war, would, if she had written from the heart, have seen creep and loiter the poison-gas doom of the sword. Would it be possible for a poet to say who wrote because she must and could none other :

" Beauty, the form of the blade, and valour--its force And Honour--its deathless soul, I have sung of them all "

I cannot believe that is the invincible accent.

If this be true, doubtfully of Mr. Kendon, much less doubt- fully of Miss Stuart, how certainly. true it. is of Mr. Childe..

confess that I can find no response to the unguessable and unguessed in verse such as : - " The sunset fades as a wild white rose, The rabbits skip in the fairies' close :

I have hung up my heart on a wicked thorn.:

but I have looked in vain through the book for any trace of blood.

Nor can Mr. Fyson, though his net is more delicate, draw the meshes close enough, even for one startled instant, to arrest the winged wanderer. And that is all the more distracting because at least .once or twice a stray gold feather indicates that, if only he had drawn the net with ruder fingers, his guest would not have flown. " I pray," he writes

" I pray it be no more Thy will To scatter seed on my poor earth, For hyacinth and daffodil

Keep transient though golden state."

But still there is a sense of a torn mesh, of the essential beauty escaped and wandering.

Should we have a moratorium ? I do not think so, nor, of course, does Mr. Woolf, but I wish some of the poets did not frighten me with hints that the sudden post-War ardour is dying. It isn't, it mustn't, and it can't. Perhaps next time Mr. Kendon will have been caught up by it.

HUMBERT WOLFE.