The drowsy rain battered against his delight
Of the half forgotten poignancies,
That settle in the dusk of an autumn night
On a world one hears and sees.
One was, he thought, an echo merely,
A glow enshadowed of truths untraced;
But the autumn sadness, brought him yearly,
Was a joy embraced.
THANKING GOD
The way folks had of thanking God
He found annoying, till he thought
Of flame and coolness in the sod—
Of balms and blessings that they wrought.
And so the habit grew, and then—
Of when and how he did not care—
He found his God as other men
The mystic verb in a grammar of prayer.
He never knelt, nor uttered words—
His laughter felt no chastening rod;
“My being,” he said, “is a choir of birds,
And all my senses are thanking God.”
Mr. Braithwaite is thoroughly conversant, as these selections indicate, with the subtleties and finest effects of the art poetic, and his impulses to write spring from the deepest human speculations, the purest motives of art. Hence in his work he takes his place among the few.
V. George Reginald Margetson
Under tropical suns, amid the tropical luxuriance of nature, developed the many-hued imagination of the subject of this sketch. His nature is tropical, for Mr. Margetson is a prolific bard: Songs of Life, The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society, Ethiopia’s Flight, England in the West Indies—four published books, and more yet unpublished—are proof. No excerpts can fully reveal the distinctive quality of Mr. Margetson’s poetry—its sonorous and ever-varying flow, like a mountain stream, its descriptive richness in which it resembles his native islands. For he was born in the British West Indies, and there lived the first twenty years of his life. Coming to America in 1897, his home has been in Boston or its environment since that time. Educated in the Moravian School at St. Kitts, he has lived with and in the English poets from Spenser to Byron—Byron seems to have been his favorite—and so has cultivated his native talent. I can give here but one brief lyric from his pen.