In The Voice and the Dusk what a play of colour:
"The slender moon and one pale star,
A rose leaf and a silver bee
From some god's garden blown afar,
Go down the gold deep tranquilly.
"Within the south there rolls and grows
A mighty town with tower and spire,
From a cloud bastion masked with rose
The lightning flashes diamond fire."
A poet's nom de plume is that of "Katherine Hale," so well known in private life as Mrs. John W. Garvin, who to her own charm as a poet must add still another as the wife of a poet and a critic of distinction as well. The gods endowed "Katherine Hale" with a resplendent lyre, and her poems have flown to many lands. Perhaps no poem of the war has more closely touched the universal heart than has "Katherine Hale's" poem, so intense in its restrained power, entitled Grey Knitting, so widely known that from it only these three stanzas will be given:
"All through the country, in the autumn stillness,
A web of grey spreads strangely, rim to rim;
And you may hear the sound of knitting needles.
Incessant, gentle—dim.
"A tiny click of little wooden needles,
Elfin amid the gianthood of war;
Whispers of women, tireless and patient,
Who weave the web afar.
* * * * * *
"I like to think that soldiers, gayly dying
For the white Christ on fields with shame sown deep,
May hear the fairy click of women's needles
As they fall fast asleep."
What a spell of potent witchery she weaves in her song I used to Wear a Gown of Green: