Or there are poems in which passion trembles under a fine restraint, as in "Friends":
Yet, are we friends: the gods have granted this.
Withholding wine, they brimmed for us the cup
With cool, sweet waters, ever welling up,
That we might drink, and, drinking, dream of bliss.
O gods, in your cold mercy, merciless,
Heed lest time raze your thrones; and at the sign,
The cool, sweet-welling waters turn to wine;
The spark to day, and dearth to bounteousness.
And there is the group of classical pieces at the end of the book, in which one regretfully passes over the flexible blank-verse of "Helen in Rhodos" and "The Mariners," to choose a still more characteristic passage from "A Lament for Helen":
Helen has fallen: she for whom Troy fell
Has fallen, even as the fallen towers.
O wanderers in dim fields of asphodel,
Who spilt for her the wine of earthly hours,
With you for evermore
By Lethe's darkling shore
Your souls' desire shall dwell.
.....
But we who sojourn yet in earthly ways;
How shall we sing, now Helen lieth dead?
Break every lyre and burn the withered bays,
For song's sweet solace is with Helen fled.
Let sorrow's silence be
The only threnody
O'er beauty's fallen head.
But this book, which is so good an example of poetic art in the older English manner, is not Mr Gibson's distinguishing achievement. That came immediately afterwards, and was the outcome of the changed ideal which we have already noted. The Web of Life may be said to belong to a definite school—though to be sure its relation to that school is in affinity rather than actual resemblance. The books which follow have no such relation: they stand alone and refuse to be classified, either in subject or in form. And while the earlier work would seem to claim its author for the nineteenth century, in Daily Bread he is new-born a twentieth-century poet of full stature.
The most striking evidence of the change is in the subject-matter. Daily Bread, like Fires, is in three parts, and each of them contains six or seven pieces. There is thus a total of about forty poems, every one of which is created out of an episode from the lives of the working poor. Thus we find a young countryman, workless and destitute in a London garret, joined by his village sweetheart who refuses to leave him to starve alone. A farm labourer and his wife are rising wearily in the cold dawn to earn bread for the six sleeping children. There are miners and quarrymen in some of the many dangers of their calling, and their womenfolk enduring privation, suspense and bereavement with tireless courage. There is a stoker, dying from burns that he has sustained at the furnace, whose young wife retorts with passionate bitterness to a hint of compensation: