Part 28 (1/2)

I have forgotten whence I came, Or what my home might be, Or by what strange and savage name I called that thundering sea.

I only know the sun shone down As still it s.h.i.+nes to-day, And in my fingers long and brown The little pebbles lay.

_Anna Wickham_

Anna Wickham, one of the most individual of the younger women-poets, has published two distinctive volumes, _The Contemplative Quarry_ (1915) and _The Man with a Hammer_ (1916).

THE SINGER

If I had peace to sit and sing, Then I could make a lovely thing; But I am stung with goads and whips, So I build songs like iron s.h.i.+ps.

Let it be something for my song, If it is sometimes swift and strong.

REALITY

Only a starveling singer seeks The stuff of songs among the Greeks.

Juno is old, Jove's loves are cold; Tales over-told.

By a new risen Attic stream A mortal singer dreamed a dream.

Fixed he not Fancy's habitation, Nor set in bonds Imagination.

There are new waters, and a new Humanity.

For all old myths give us the dream to be.

We are outwearied with Persephone; Rather than her, we'll sing Reality.

SONG

I was so chill, and overworn, and sad, To be a lady was the only joy I had.

I walked the street as silent as a mouse, Buying fine clothes, and fittings for the house.

But since I saw my love I wear a simple dress, And happily I move Forgetting weariness.

_Siegfried Sa.s.soon_

Siegfried Loraine Sa.s.soon, the poet whom Masefield hailed as ”one of England's most brilliant rising stars,” was born September 8, 1886. He was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, and was a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He fought three times in France, once in Palestine, winning the Military Cross for bringing in wounded on the battlefield.

His poetry divides itself sharply in two moods--the lyric and the ironic. His early lilting poems were without significance or individuality. But with _The Old Huntsman_ (1917) Sa.s.soon found his own idiom, and became one of the leading younger poets upon the appearance of this striking volume. The first poem, a long monologue evidently inspired by Masefield, gave little evidence of what was to come. Immediately following it, however, came a series of war poems, undisguised in their tragedy and bitterness. Every line of these quivering stanzas bore the mark of a sensitive and outraged nature; there was scarcely a phrase that did not protest against the ”glorification” and false glamour of war.

_Counter-Attack_ appeared in 1918. In this volume Sa.s.soon turned entirely from an ordered loveliness to the gigantic brutality of war.

At heart a lyric idealist, the b.l.o.o.d.y years intensified and twisted his tenderness till what was stubborn and satiric in him forced its way to the top. In _Counter-Attack_ Sa.s.soon found his angry outlet.

Most of these poems are choked with pa.s.sion; many of them are torn out, roots and all, from the very core of an intense conviction; they rush on, not so much because of the poet's art but almost in spite of it. A suave utterance, a neatly-joined structure would be out of place and even inexcusable in poems like ”The Rear-Guard,” ”To Any Dead Officer,” ”Does It Matter?”--verses that are composed of love, fever and indignation.

Can Sa.s.soon see nothing glorious or uplifting in war? His friend, Robert Nichols, another poet and soldier, speaks for him in a preface.

”Let no one ever,” Nichols quotes Sa.s.soon as saying, ”from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hards.h.i.+p of soul by it. For war is h.e.l.l, and those who inst.i.tute it are criminals.