RECENT VERSE.* " Tee grand style arises in poetry," writes

Matthew Arnold, " when

a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject." This definition is recalled and illustrated by a

good many of the poems in Mr. William Watson's new volume.' No living writer of verse excels him in the grand style. Matthew Arnold's definition, however, seems to insist perhaps unduly on austerity • of diction, and to exclude the element of dignified pageantry which is so finely apparent in the sonnet on " The Gifts of Hindustan " :- " This day do maharajah and zemindar Show forth the Orient's most imperial mood. Satrapies old, and kingdoms that were food For ravening Time already in years afar, Long ere Hydaspes' tido disdained to bar The hosts of Alexander, bring unwooed Their offerings, and the East forgets to brood, And leaps to follow in tempest England's star.

For thero, where first it bloomed, still wisdom flowers, And Hindustan knows well her friends, being wise Hither, with smouldering empires in her eyes, She pours unasked her tributary gold, Pouring therewith her heart's goodwill, in showers Richer than all Golconda an hundredfold."

Yet Mr. Watson is not habitually profuse of decorative imagery. In his preface, after alluding to the number of poems in his volume cast in the sonnet form, he speaks of it as " a mould which, when used in the spirit and tradition of its stricter masters from Milton on- wards, is not a loose aggregation of lines which chance to be fourteen in number, but one of the most rigorously exacting of poetic forms ; a form usually demanding from him who employs it no little mental concentration, and enjoining upon him a certain artistic asceticism such as forbids his being seduced into mere by-play of thought and emotion." At his best Mr. Watson is true to his precept. He is a groat craftsman, but does not allow himself to be dominated by his mastery of his medium. The contents of his volume lie rightly describes as including little that can be called poems of action. The book should be considered as " an intermittent commentary on the main developments, and some of the collateral phenomena, of the war." The poem which gives its title to the collection blends fable with fact in a comparison between Merlin and Mr. Lloyd George. The legend tells how Vortigern, with the aid of Merlin, was able to defeat the malign powers who sapped the

foundations of his Tower of Safety. But while developing his parallel Mr. Watson is careful to enlarge on the contrast. He sees

in the Premier " no fabled Merlin, son of mist, And brother to the twilight, but a man Who in a time terrifically real Is real as the time ; formed for the time ;

• (1) The Man who San', and other Poems arising J rom the War. By William Watson. London : John Murray. (3s. gd. net.]—(2) Lolli,lgdon Downs, and other Poem:, with Sonnets. By John Masefield. London : W. Heinemann. 13s. ed. net.)-- (3) The Old Huntsman, and other Poems. By Siegfried Swoon. Same publisher. Its. net.]—(4) Vagabond Verses. By (maths Garstin. London : Sidgwick and Jackson. [2s. 6d. net.]—(5) Some Verse. By F. S. Second Impression. Same publishers. 12s. Deg

Not much 'beholden to the munificent. Past, In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour.;

No faggot of perfections, angel or saint,

Created faultless and intolerable • No meeting-place of all the heaveinlinesses ; But eminently a man to stir and spur Men,.to afflict them with benign alarm, Harass their sluggish and uneager blood, Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal."

The poems on Germany are animated by a righteous indignation at her faithlessness to her own heroic past and the teachings of her master-minds ; sometimes, as in the Dirge on the Kaiser, it

lapses into a seem indignatio. One cannot altogether help regret-

ting the republication of the sonnets on America's neutrality, fine though they are. Of the poems of action, " The Battle of the Bight," with its splendid opening, and the stanzas on " Our Men " are wholly admirable. The spirit of our fighting men could not be more simply or truly expressed than in these lines :— " They go where England speeds them ; They laugh and jest at Fate. They go where England needy them, And dream not they are great.

And oft, 'mid smoke and smother By blinding warstorm 'fanned, Sons of our mighty Mother, They fall that she may stand."

Mr. Masefield's new volume' oontains more than fifty sonnets, forming a long cycle, but broken by a few interludes, descriptive, allegorical, dramatic, narrative, or lyrical. "The Ship," in which the ore, the trees, the hemp and flax, the workers and the sailors, and last of all the ship herself, take up the tale in succession, has something of the ring of the authentic Masefield in it, and there is charm in the lines Night is on the Downland," with their memories of Roman nobles and,bygone glories. But the tale of the haunted

farm -is a more cruel parody of himself than any of Mr. Squire's

essays in irreverent discipleship :- " His father clubbed The girl on the _head, Young Will upped And shot hurt dead."

The sequel of a dance is described in the same vein of dismal and devastating realism :- " Nan was the belle, and she married her beau, Who drank, and then beat her, and she died long ago ; And Mary, her sister, is married, and gone To a tea-planter's lodge, in the plains, in Ceylon.

And Dorothy's sons have been killed out in France, And May lost her man in the August advance, And Em the man jilted, and she lives all alone In the house of this dance which seems:burnt in my bone."

The subject-matter of the sonnets reminds us- alternately of Lucretius and FitzGerald's paraphrase of Omar Khayyam—though the treatment lacks the composure of the one or the serenity of the other—and we cannot resist the conclusion that the difficulties of the task have been increased by the form adopted. In the earlier numbers Mr. Masefield is largely concerned with the -biological conception of life, and there is hardly a sonnet in which reference is not made to cells—living cells and carrion coils, the million cells of sense, and the ultimate mystery of the Master Cell. " It may be, that we cease ; we cannot tell. Even if we cease, life is a miracle." But the note becomes gloomier as the poem advances. " We are neither heaven nor earth, but men." " There is no God ; but we, who breathe theair, Are God ourselves, and touch God everywhere." Even Beauty—" this grace, this spring, this given bread, This life, this dawn, this wakening from the dead "—is an elusive dream.

Beauty was with me once, but now,-grown old, I cannot hear nor see her." And again :- " There is no beauty, for we tread a scene Red to the eye with blood of living things ; Thought -.is but joy from murder that has been, Life is but brute at war upon its kings."

Time cycle closes on a note of sombre acquiescence :- " Let that which is to come be as it may, Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense, The flies are happy in the summer day, Flies will be happy many summers hence. Time with his antique breeds that built the -Sphinx, Time with her men to come whose wings will tower, Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks, But with blind force, to each his little hour.

And when the hour has struck, comes death or change, Which whether good or ill we cannot tell, But the blind planet will wander through her range Bearing men like us who will serve as well.

The sun will rise, the winds that ever move Will blow our dust that once were mon in love."

Most of Mr. Sassoon'a poems' are inspired by first-hand experi- ence of the grim business of war. His mood is often harsh and bitter, but he is saved from despair by his genius for friendship —even though his friends are dead—and his belief in tho reality of his dreams :— " All the while I watch the spark .Lit to guide me ; for I know Dreams will triumph, though the dark Scowls above inc whore I go." War is hateful, yet he acknowledges its discipline :— " War is ounecourge ; yet war has made •us wise, And, fighting for our freedom, we are free. Horror of wounds, and anger at tho foe, And loss of things desired ' • all these must pass. We are the happy legion, for we know

Time's but a golden wind that shakos the grass."

Nothing is finer in •a book which has many fine things than the tributes to the common soldier—notably the remarkable poem headed " The Redeemer," from which we take these lines " No thorny crown, only a woollen cap He wore—an English soldier, white and strong, Who loved his time like any simple chap. Good days of work and sport and homely song ; Now he has learned that nights are very long, And dawn a watching of the windowed sky. But to the end, unjudging, he'll endure Horror and pain, not uncontont to die That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure."

There is saturnine humour in the portrait of the old huntsman, but also a wonderful insight into the heart of the hunting man and an intense appreciation of the landscape side of the best and noblest of field sports. There is also tenderness

in the familiar epistolary lines to a comrade which close the collection. But whatever his mood, Mr. Bassoon gives it free and passionate utterance. His temper is perhaps best expressed in his own words : "I walk the secret way With anger in my brain." But it is for the moat part a generous indignation, and at the back of it all there is always the consciousness of " glory exulting over

pain, And beauty, garlanded in Hell."

Mr. Crosbie Garstin's Vagabond Verses+ are rightly named. His poems are dated from the South Seas, the Grand Canaries, the Grand Banks, Vancouver, the Rockies, Durban, Khama's Country, Matabeleland, and Flanders—and oven this does not exhaust the list. He loves now and again to return home and see the magic of the Weald, but the longing for adventure is always tugging at his heart. " All day long the prairies called, and all night long I heard the sea." He excels in miniature sketches of tropical and outlandish scenes—dawn on the veld, outspanning in the mid-day heat ; he writes swinging chanties, and has at his command the patois of the habitats!, the rough speech of the pioneer, the lingo of the trenches. He is by turns truculent and tender, grim and sentimental, but 'sever wastes words or allows the form to master -his purpose. A whole Odyssey of varied experience is packed into this little volume.

The issue of a "second impression " of Some Verse, by " -F. S.,"4 enables us to pay a belated tribute to the grace, the wit, and the scholarship of a writer who carries on the best tradition of light verse as defined by Locker. As with Calverley, sanity and kindliness underlie the mask of irresponsible levity, and sometimes.

as in " 1914," " F. S." is very much in earnest. Where all is so good it is hard to choose our favourite pieces, but we may specially commend the excellent travesty of Browning in " A Grammarian's Wedding," the " imaginary correspondence " between Walt Whitman and Austin Dobson, and the conversation between Thomas Moore and Mr. Yeats. Hereparody is not mere mimicry, but an instrument of criticism. " The Not Impossible She " recalls the gentle irony of Locker, while in the " Narrative Macaronic Verses " we have a delightful exercise in that now rarely practised art of which

" Palms conscripti took a boat and went to Philippi " is perhaps the beat-known example. But " F. S." is a more ingenious and scholarly performer than the author of that now forgotten classic.