NEW POEMS. By Iolo Aneurin Williams. Methuen. 3s. 6d. net.
Mr. Williams' first book of poems, published four years ago, was a quite little book, noticeable for some polished little songs with a Caroline or Queen Anne air. His tastes have remained the same; his capacity for writing has developed; he paints miniatures, and his ingenuity expends itself on the elaboration and variation of the frames. The frontier between success and non-success is narrow in this kind of work; a slight flaw ruins all, and Mr. Williams does not always escape collapse. But Alice and Song are of a neatness and completeness which would do credit to the best of the Queen Anne practitioners. The Country Songs is a fragment of what may become a really excellent celebration of our folk-songs, and Rocks and Astronomy, though still with something of the song in them, let delicate plummets into deeper waters. The image of the rock, doomed to decay, yet
The lizard's immortal friend,
And deathless to the flower,
is happy Astronomy we quote in full:
Jupiter may be that or this
Of stars that shine in heaven,
Neptune a mere hypothesis,
And Saturn one of seven.
They will not make the dark less bright,
For names I do not know;
Nameless the stars across the night
In nameless beauty go.
Over my head their vault is bent—
A mirror and a screen—
An ever fresh prefigurement
Of glory past the seen.
It is an unambitious and uneven but very pleasant little book.
THE WAR POEMS OF SIEGFRIED SASSOON. Heinemann. 3s. 6d. net.
This volume contains fifty-two poems selected from Mr. Sassoon's previous volumes, and twelve new ones. The former are far too well known to need description at this date; but we think that even in these, and still more in the new poems, there is ground for the conjecture that those who think of Mr. Sassoon primarily as a savage realist and satirist are likely in the future to be surprised. It was a genuine and profound sensibility, tenderness, and a cheated passion for beauty that produced his war poetry; not an innate predilection for violence, vituperation, or caricature. Now the storm has gone over he seems to be becoming more and more a poet of nature. The transition is perhaps symbolised in the most beautiful of the new poems here printed. It is called Everyone Sang, and concludes the book, so full of blood and corpses, rats, evil smells, and all the turmoil and débris of war: