POETRY.
OXFORD IN MAY.
Tan motors hum along the High, And out of wide-flung windows blown A husky and a strangled cry Bewrays the gramophone.
The 'Transatlantic tourist, primed With Baedeker's nutritious tips, By schedule accurately timed The cup of culture sips.
Slim wisp-like maidens bravely seek To reconcile the jarring claims Of auetion bridge and higher Greek, Of golf and Henry James. The married don, at evensong, Hies homeward to his chic abode, A. hundred miles or so along, Sweet Banbury, thy road.
And Youth, with sleek pomaded hair Brushed backward, delicately goes In tweeds that clamour for repair, And highly-coloured hose ; Enamoured of Debussy's lay, And Musefield's sanguinary line] Yet ready to admit that Gray And Bach are rather fine.
Students of Shaw, yet laced by Yeats Into the realm of Celtic mists, And mostly—if they read for Greats—.
Utopian Socialists.
Yet still from cloister mid from hall, From garden lawn and river grange, Comes the ancestral magic call That never suffers change.
Undaunted by the hooting horn, The nightingale divinely sings, And May untainted on the thorn Her snowy mantle flings.
The silver-sliding river runs Through meadows drest in living gold; And Oxford, greater than her sons, Reigns over Young and Old. C. L. G.
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