of war, but rather as the interpreter of that cultured England which, audax omnia perpeti, has dared to suffer and to think, and by thinking has reached those ultimate truths that alone can bring abiding consolation.

By a happy inspiration he has reprinted certain earlier poems which notably, like 'Thunder on the Downs,' heralded the coming storm. The opening war poem entitled 'The Fourth of August' will always remain as a living document of the emotion that swept through the nation at the outbreak of the war.

'Now in thy splendour go before us,
Spirit of England, ardent-eyed,
Enkindle this dear earth that bore us,
In the hour of peril purified.

'The cares we hugged drop out of vision,
Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate.
We step from days of sour division
Into the grandeur of our fate.

'For us the glorious dead have striven,
They battled that we might be free.
We to their living cause are given;
We arm for men that are to be.'

Truly the trumpet call of that wonderful army that sprang as it were by a miracle from the soil when Englishmen suddenly realised the country was in danger!

This splendid overture was soon followed by two masterpieces in which the poet revealed himself as the spokesman not merely of the cultured but of all classesor rather of the whole nation. To Women' and 'For the Fallen ' are inscribed for ever on the heart of England. As regards the first, who has hitherto ever so well described before the woman's part in war?

'Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts
That have foreknown the utter price,
Your hearts burn upward like a flame
Of splendour and of sacrifice.

'For you, you too, to battle go,

Not with the marching drums and cheers,
But in the watch of solitude

And through the boundless night of tears.

'Swift, swifter than those hawks of war,
Those threatening wings that pulse the air,
Far as the vanward ranks are set,

You are gone before them, you are there!

'And not a shot comes blind with death
And not a stab of steel is pressed

Home, but invisibly tore

And entered first a woman's breast.'

Equally if not indeed better known is that wonderful threnody for the fallen in which the poet who in his early Requiem for A. S. P.' had expressed so touchingly his sorrow for the loss of a beloved friend, now utters in unsurpassable verse the sorrow of a whole nation for its dead:

'With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

'Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.'

.

But it would need a separate article to do justice to the volume, which contains over sixty poems. Here we can only allude to a few of the more striking, as 'The Antagonists,' with its fine analysis of the soul of France going forth to battle, and The Bereaved,' which is a splendid variant of the poem 'To Women,' and in which the lingering suspense and anguish of those at home for those at the front are depicted in immortal verse. These are perhaps the most poignant stanzas of a poem one would like to have quoted in its entirety.

'Oh had we failed them, then were we desolate now And separated indeed,

What should have comforted, what should have helped us then

In the time of our bitter need!

'But now, though sorrow be ever fresh, sorrow

Is tender as love; it knows

That of love it was born, and Love with the shining eyes The hard way chose.'

Other noteworthy poems are 'The Deportation' with its subdued yet striking realism, The Arras Road,' 'Cambrai,' 'An Incident at Cambrai,' and 'Fetching the Wounded with its Rembrandt-like night effects. It is not for nothing that the author was for months a stretcherbearer in a French clearing station. In some of these the metre literally throbs with war rhythms that even more than the words recall to the reader the very mood and sensations of the scenes the poet is depicting. Here he has, time after time, let himself go with the happiest results, notably in Gallipoli,' which moves with the freedom and sweep of a Pindaric ode, while in 'Stonehenge' the static grandeur of the unchanging past and the bustle and vigour of the young artillery horsemen is most happily reproduced in the varying rhythms. And finally there is one grim little poem in vers libres entitled 'Hunger' which appears to us a brilliant success in that most difficult of all 'genres':

'I come among the people like a shadow.

I sit down by each man's side.

'None sees me, but they look on one another,
And know that I am there.

'My silence is like the silence of the tide
That buries the playground of children;

'Like the deepening of frost in the slow night,
When birds are dead in the morning.

'Armies trample, invade, destroy,
With guns roaring from earth and air.

'I am more terrible than armies,

I am more feared than cannon.

'Kings and chancellors give commands;
I give no commands to any ;

'But I am listened to more than kings
And more than passionate orators.

'I unswear words and undo deeds.

Naked things know me.

'I am the first and the last to be felt of the living.
I am Hunger.'

6

Laurence Binyon, as we suggested at the outset, is a many-sided poet. The Death of Adam,' 'The Death of Tristram' and 'Penthesilea' all testify to his power to revivify and recreate the past, just as 'London Visions' bears witness to his power to show the poetry underlying the commonest and most sordid lives of to-day. His supreme sense of beauty is illustrated by the Dryad,' while his feeling for external nature is exemplified by 'Bab-lock-hythe,' by 'Château Gaillard,' and many passages in London Visions.' All this poetry represents a very wide sympathy, ever sure, though at times it might be more intense. The underlying emotion is, in fact, unduly sacrificed to a penchant for reverie and reflexion, 'sicklied o'er,' one might say, 'with the pale cast of thought,' if the expression were not too strong. But, when this reflectiveness is quickened, as it were, by the breaking-through of the fires of passion below, then, as we have seen in the analysis of such poems as 'Sirmione,' 'The Mirror,' 'The Secret' and others, the poet achieves a rare clairvoyance and insight into the heart of things, extending to mere animate nature as in 'The Tiger Lily,' or even to inanimate things as in The Statues,' and the description of the rock in Malham Cove.' He becomes in fact the seer, with a real message to deliver, even if, as we see, it is of a somewhat metaphysical nature.

And, lastly, in his war poems he becomes the mouthpiece of English culture under the duress of war, interpreting its deepest emotions and giving as it were the answer of its truest and best to the Sphinx-like riddle of Death, rising in his supremest moments to the spokesmanship of the whole nation in those two immortal poems, To Women' and 'For the Fallen,' while his verse grows ever more subtle and plastic as it becomes more and more attuned to the infinite modulations of suffering and anguish which form as it were the minor key of the music of war.

We have not infrequently heard Binyon compared

to Wordsworth. There is obviously in both a common bent towards meditation and reflexion and a desire to explore and interpret the mystical arcana of Nature. But the parallel may be carried still further. The Four Years' probably finds its closest prototype in literature in the Political Sonnets of the Lake Poet. Each is, in fact, a sort of intermittent diary of some of the chief psychological moments through which the English nation has passed in the two greatest wars in its history. It is interesting indeed to compare the supreme Leit-motiv in each case. In Wordsworth's poems the chief stress is laid on liberty. In Mr Binyon's it is rather the pathetic side which is uppermost. The spirit of the former is the spirit of the French Revolution. The spirit of the latter is that of Stoicism tempered by Pity. Both poets in fact, in their best war poems, have been the true interpreters of their time and their nation, and both have thereby secured for themselves immortality.

But if Wordsworth, especially the Wordsworth of the earlier period, may be regarded under certain aspects as a prototype of Binyon, the later Wordsworth may also serve with his growing prolixity as a warning example to the latter. The French have a hard saying, 'Qui ne sait pas se borner, ne sait jamais écrire.' Binyon writes with such apparent facility and abundance, that one feels at times the need for concision and compression. His failing is not Dryden's neglect to blot, for the workmanship is uniformly good, but a neglect to eliminate not so much the superfluous as the superabundant. The poet, as Pindar learnt early, must not sow from the sack.

CLOUDESLEY BRERETON.