RECENT WAR VERSE.*

IN any survey, however imperfect, of recent war verse, a reviewer is inclined to give priority to those writers who have laid down their lives for their country. But quite apart from this consideration, the poems of the late Captain Sorley I stand in a class by themselves. He was only a few months at the front. The greater number of these pieces wo:a written before the war, and there is hardly any insistence on the techni- calities, the humours, or the horrors of trench life. What strikes one most about his poems is the strange prescience of the ordeal in store for England shown in those written while he was still a schoolboy, his con- tempt for talk, for the " pale puny soldiers of the pen," and his disregard for the ordinary standards by which success is judged. The six months that he spent in Germany before the war inspired him with respect and tolerance for our enemies. For the rest, we may note his intense love of Downland and of Marlborough. The later verses are unrevised, and often rough and halting in metre, but they have vision and an unaffected originality of imagery—witness the marching song from which we quote two stanzas :-

" Cast away regret and rue, Think what you are marching to.

Little live, great pass. Jesus Christ and Barabbas Were found the same day. This died, that went his way. So sing with joyful breath. For why, you are going to death. Teeming earth will surely store All the gladness that you pour.

• (1) Marlborough, and other Poems. By Charles Hamilton SOrley, late of Marl- borough College, sometime Captain in the Suffolk Regiment. Cambridge : at the University Press. 13s. Cd. net.)—(2) Colwyn Erasmus Arnold Philipps, Captain Royal Horse Guards, born December 11th, 1888; killed in action near Ypres, May 13th, 1915. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. 15s. net.)—(3) Soliloquies of a Subaltern: Somewhere in France. By Dic Thirkell Cooper. London : Burns and Oates. ils. net.)--,4) Songs from the Trenches. By Captain C. W. Blackall. London : John Lane. lie. net.)—(5) Oxford and Flanders. By " Observer. R.F.C." Oxford : B. H. Blackwell. Os. net.)—(6) Ypres, and other Poems. By William O. Shakespeare. London : Sklgwick and Jackson. [2s. net.)—(7) Batik. By Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. London: Elkin Mathews. Its. net.)—(8) The Naval Crown: Ballads and Songs of the War. By C. Fox Smith. Same publisher and price.—(9) Oxford Poetry, 1915. Edited by G. D. if. C. and T. W. E. Oxford : B. H. Blackwell. [is. net.)—(10) War-Time. Verses by Owen Seaman. London : Constable and Co. its. net.)—(11) Sonnets of the Empire, before and during the Gran War. By Archibald T. Strong. London: Macmillan and Co. (Si. nett

Earth that never doubts nor fears, Earth that knows of death, not tears, Earth that bore with joyful ease Hemlock for Socrates, Earth that blossomed and was glad 'Neath the cross that Christ had, Shall rejoice and blossom too When the bullet reaches you.

Wherefore, men marching On the road to death, sing !

Pour your gladness on earth's head, So be merry, so be dead."

Those are verses which Webster would not have disdained to write.

Of the other pieces, perhaps the most remarkable is the charming epistle in verse in which Captain Sorley draws on his memories of the Odyssey to show the essential similarity between Homeric and modem soldiering, finds in the present conflict " the old war-joy, the old war- pain," and forecasts the return of the " sons of one school across the sea "

" And soon, 0 soon, I do not doubt it,

With the body or without it, We shall all come tumbling down To our old wrinkled, red-capped town."

The memorial volume of letters and poems by the late Captain Colwyn Philipps 2 reveals, among other engaging traits, his passionate attachment to his Welsh home, his touching devotion to his mother—" the pilot of my soul," as he calls her in the beautiful verses which stand first of all— his love of horse and beast and bird, and his simple, wholesome outdoor philosophy Captain Philipps's catholic taste is shown by the delightful tribute to " R. K." and the admiration for Browning expressed in his letters. Altogether, this is a worthy record of a gallant soldier whose heroic end crowned and fulfilled the ideals expressed n t is verse.

Mr. Eric Thirkell Cooper's Soliloquies of a Suialtern: Somewhere in France' and Captain Blackall's Songs from the Trenches' are both excellent in their cheerfulness, kindliness, and good comradeship. The subaltern strikes occasionally a deeper note in " The Mercy Ship," the vision of the " Legions of the Dead," the touching lines " To a Mother," and the stanzas headed " Blind." But the humours of trench life are not forgotten, and the spirit of endurance is admirably summed up in th3 lines on " th3 quiet, way that wins," and in " Carry On." Captain Bla kal' tells us in his preface that he rejoined his old regiment after several years in the theatrical profession, and " coming, as it were, straight from the artificial to the real," learned to recognize " more fully than ever the wonderful pluck, endurance, and unfailing cheerfulness of the men." In the " Song of the Trench " and " Digging " he has paid his homage in verse that swings and sticks in the memory. The lines on the Padre, the " little Doctor," and the stretcher-bearers afford further evidence of Captain Blackall's generous desire to render justice to unobtrusive heroism.

In Oxford and Flanders' we have a typical example of the enlarging effect of the war and contact with raw realities on a keen and receptive mind. The Oxford poems are for the most part graceful essays in discipleship, in which the inspiration may be traced to Caroline and Classical sources. But the poems from Flanders are the real thing— witness the two pictures of the aerodrome at dawn and dusk and the fine " Song of the Air." " Observer's " historic sense is revealed in th3 vigorous poem on " Th3 Road " as it "rang to the tread of the marching Roman," " echoed the march of the mailed Crusader," and now to-day is swept by " horse and cannon and motor-train " ; and again in " The Marsh Folk." Two spirited pieces on fighting in the North Sea show command of naval argot as well as insight into the mind of the bluejacket.

The majority of Captain Shakespeare's litt13 collection, Ypres, and other Poems,' do not touch on the war, but the three Ypres sonnets, one of which, " The Refugees," has appeared in the Spectator, are particularly attractive and show a high level of accomplishment. All Captain Shakespeare's verse is pleasant, and " The Red Nun " proves that he can strike the tragic note with much effect.

Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's war poems 7 are notable for their laconic simplicity and their freedom from literary artifice. His best effects are achieved by contrast, by their illustrations of the hark-back of memory from the screech of shells to " the curlew's calling by Hallypike," from fighting among Belgian wurzels to hoeing them in Gloucestershire, from the chances of being sniped to the irrelevant thought whether the old cow that was " gey bad the night I left " died or not. No better example of Mr. Gibson's method can be given than the stanzas headed " The Reek " :—

" To-night they're sitting by the peat

Talking of me, I know—

Grandfather in the ingle seat, Mother and Meg and Joe.

I feel a sudden puff of heat That sets my ears aglow, And smell the reek of burning peat Across the Belgian snow."

Miss Fox Smith's ballads and songs 8 need no recommendation to readers of the Spectator. She is one of the few people living who can write a real " chanty," combining a mastery of sea-lingo with a perfect command of sea-rhythms. Other poets have sung of the patient heroism of our bluejackets : the special note of Miss Fox Smith's volume is her splendid and well-deserved tribute to the fighting British merchantman. The " Ballad of the Eastern Crown,' " " British Merchant Service, 1915," " Armed Merchantmen," and the lines on the Grimsby trawlers show her at her best, but there is not a line in the book that does not breathe the spirit of fortitude and endurance. Our only criticism. is on the statement in " The Mouth-Organ " that " there ain't no bird's in Plug Street Wood, the guns have sent them flying." One of the curiosities of the war is the continuance of bird life in the immediate neighbourhood of the trenches.

The book of Oxford Poetry, 1915,9 is a medley of pose and poetry, the former predominating, most of the writers being preoccupied, in the phrase of one of their number, with the effort to " find some gesture of my own." As this preoccupation has probably yielded ewe they wrote to a more strenuous and worthy ambition, it would be ungenerous to dwell on it. Self-consciousness is happily absent from many of these pieces, notably those of Mr. Godfrey Elton from Quetta and the Medi- terranean, which breathe a tender nostalgia for the English countryside. There are some fine lines on Oxford's past and future in Miss Dorothy Sayers's " Lay " and a hearty vigour in Mr. Sherard Vines's protest against the unending chatter about the eternal duel of sex.

There is one advantage in, though it is no justification for, a belated notice of Sir Owen Seaman's War-Time.'" It submits poems written week by week in the early months of the war to a severer test of their insight into its realities than if it had been applied at the date of their republication. Sir Owen Seaman's command of technique is above criticism ; but qualities undiscovered in his earlier work emerge in these war-time verses. Though mainly directed against the crimes of Kultur, they do not spare those at home who stand in the way of unity or hamper our efficiency by false patriotism. No editor of Punch has ever had such opportunities, but none has been more finely equipped for turning them to the noblest account.

Mr. Archibald Strong, already favourably known by his clever translations of de Banville as well as by his original verses, describes his first aim as " to trace the spiritual growth of the British Empire through the lives of the men who made it, and in the latter part . . . to crystallize, if I only could, a few of the ideals which inform it to-day and contain its future promise." More than half of these fifty sonnets II were written before August, 1914 ; but while keeping to his scheme for the most part, he has added a number of war sonnets. Mr. Strong, who was born in Australia, brings to his task a fine technical equipment, a faithful study of Elizabethan literature, a deep pride in Greater Britain, and an undying love for Oxford. This is no drum and trumpet chronicle, for, though Mr. Strong shows that Peace can be a destroyer as well as a preserver, his list of heroes includes Cook as well as Drake, Burke as well as Nelson, John Lawrence as well as John Nicholson, Drayton, Chatham, and Pitt as well as Ralogh, Charles Napier, and Wellington. As he writes in the sonnet on war " This is the dread antinomy of God, That utter might and mercy are but one." We should have liked to quote the fine sonnet on " Gloriana's England," the tribute to Cook as "the master and friend of seamen," and the sonnets on Australia and Oxford, but must content ourselves with the octave of the sonnet headed "Blessed are the Strife- makers " :-

"Blessing on him that in his goodly hate Of England's breed, hath smitten and slain Her foes, Her lust of pomp, Her sloth that aped repose, The pride that cankered all Her queenly state, Her youngling brawls and feuds of olden date, Envy, the jade that pricked Her boys to blows, Folly and ease, and all the gleaming shows That lured Her vision from the eyes of fate."