FLYING VERSES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3399, 7 May 1919, Page 53

FLYING VERSES.

By Jessie Macka*. W© have almost heard the last of that common pro-war saying, " This is an unpoetic age." It may be that no " Evangeline" is being -written in America, and that no new "Idylls of the King " or " Paradise Lost" forms a milestone on the English road to Olympus. But the volume, feeling, and finish of the poetry welling up from the heart of the Empire to-day is a reality that only the unread Philistine can fail to appraise as a hopeful sign of the times. We say " hopeful " advisedly, for the newly-coined word "idealogy," hurled at President \Vilson from the unquiet ante-room of the world's greatest Peace Council marks a new departure in international thought. Slowly but surely recognition is being forced of the fact that worlds are built upon " idealogy," nob on the perishing base of gold or gunpowder. And what is " idealogy " but poetry in essence — that large, natural poetry of the spheres, shaped mystically and afar, which is mirrored in miniature by the snow crystal as it falls to earth? lit is a far cry from President Wilson's new statesmanship, blowing like a monsoon, through the faded, heavy air of European chancelleries, to those fugitive verses and booklets which fly through the English-speaking world to-day; yet these humbler birds of passage testify to the "idealogy" behind us in the late war. " There is little poetry written in times of national slumber or fevers of grab and bravado. Possibly many of the poets who now emerge for their moment *or their hour would be doing better work in other callings, but this whole sensitive mass of current literature shows a people awake and thinking, a trade wind of ideas blowing from one quarter—Renaissance. From the Times Literary Supplement one gathers many a canticle or couplet which in a less crowded choir might have secured greater attention. Here is a verse of echoes from J. Crommelin-Brown's "Dies Heroica" —echoes from the greater E re-war singers like Noyes and Masefield, ut well caught:

None ever knew this England well "Who has not knowm the wood-smoke smell, Ot seen the elm-trees' sombre height Grow solemnly against the night With one star tangledl in their leaves,

Looming above the cottage eaves. These he has known who En gland knows,

Andl men have died for these and those. How little would most of us have foreseen five yeaTs ago such a tribute to France as this of John Presland's in "Poems of London":

Great ever, with the hope that seeks the The brain clear-cold, like ice: the soul like flame; The spirit beating at the physical bars; The reason guiding all—oh, there we name France!

A country that can think, and, thinking, acta; ■ A country that can act, and, acting, dreams That neither bears' the tyranny of facte. Nor of its own dear hopes, nor of what seems, * But still clear-visioned, treats with things that aae; Yet —seer, prophet, priest of life to bs— Leaps to the visionary diays afar, , And all the splendour she; will never see. This is not poetry, but it is a striking example of the new perspective in which Englishmen have learned to regard emotions which once were summed up for them in Tennyson's " red-fool-fury oi the Seine" or easy cosmopolitan " vers de societe" about the boulevards. It is true that for the cultured reader the verses of the " tramp-poet," William H. Davies, are scarcely the wind-blown leaves of which I have spoken, but the contrast between this mourning note for a lost hero: But thou, my friend, art lying dead; War, with its hell-bom childishness, Plaa claimed thy life with many more; The man that loved this England! well, And never left it once before,— And this return to the all-powerful charm of lovely Nature: But riddles are not miade for me, My joy's in beauty, not its cause; Then give me but the open skies, And birds that sing in a green wood That is snow-bound with anemones, — is characteristic of the man and his de-" tachment from the battle-spirit and all else that have made these latter years the crux of what we have called our civilisation. Neither does Mr Laurence Binyon belong to the band that were voiceless five years ago, but one cannot but quote in sadness this elegy that finds its theme broadcast from pole to pole: Spring 1 has leaped Into summer; A glory has gone from the green, The flush of the poplar has sobered out, The flame in the leaf of the lime is dulled. But I am thinking of the young merf Whoso faces ate no more seen.

Spring will com© when the earth remembers. In sunbursts after the Tain, And, the leaf be fresh and lovely on the bough; And the myriad shining blossom be boirn; But I shall be thinking of the youmg .men Whose eyes will not shine on us again. From Anthony Allen's " First Songs" one quotes with pleasure another Saxon echo of the good red fields of autumnal peace:

Red rowa#-berrles be thy orown To bring in thy September, Thy month of yellow, orange, and brown, So sweetly to remember. O! heart to greet The threshed wheat Ancl apples of September.

A field with haystacks in tie eun I« eweet thing +o re-member; And fine to seo -when day ia done The white znocm of September. 0! heart to be Alono with thco And to rern«mber. F. J. Douse, in "Poems of War," has

a verse that conveys some Idea of that parting night at the Dardanelles: So from the fading glory of that dream All through the night they made their eilent way. . , All through the night until the dawn of day The shadows of thftt great unbroken stream Flitted like ghosta: the vaster wiatch-nrea light , t. xt. Like some great altar burning through tne night, ~ Mad© ruddy every crag and ridge and oleit, As In that land 6f buried hopes they left The barren peaks and the rooks and the rugged shore ... And the noise ot the flashing waters rolling evermore. But in this concluding passage we feel again the sure hand of the practised artist as well as the seer. This is how Henry Newbolt sees the boys go by, as he tells us in the "War Films," which is the beginning of "St. George's Day' : We have sought G-od in a cloudy heaven, Wo have passed by God on earth: His seven sins and his sorrows seven, His wayworn mood and mirth, Like a ragged l cloak have hid from us The secret of His birth. Brother of men, when now I see The lads go forth in line, Thou knewost my heart is hungry in me As for thy bread said wine': Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me To take their death for mine.