3 JULY 1926, Page 21

POETRY

BARE WALLS

"BARE walls ? " she cried in horror at my room, "Bare walls for you who write ? I'll carry down A picture—I've a lovely thing in brown— An lnness, with a heron in the fume Of sunset misty pool and shadowed gloom. We'll hang it by your desk : and when you frown And bite your pen and need a thought to crown Your paragraph, you'll find it and resume."

Alas, I loved my walls !—they were so bare !- Like space without a bound, unhampered, free, Where my mind's eye could venture till it won The heart of distance. Now when I would see, My sight is hampered by the heron there, Rising with dusky plumes against the sun.

Oxford.

E. H. CRANE,