Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears and horror
Drifted away.... O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
The book contains much that, however sincere, can only be described as journalism in excelsis, but it is all inextricably mixed with genuine poetry, and the collection as a whole, we suspect, will have a permanent interest and value. Better than from a hundred histories posterity will get from these poems a picture of how men felt and looked in that world of
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.
Their merits are never more clearly displayed than when they are compared to the poems of the imitators who have sprung up like mushrooms since Mr. Sassoon began publishing. These have taken his brutal words, his more obvious attitudes, and the senile and complacent objects of his satire; but in the copies the life is lacking.
ARGONAUT AND JUGGERNAUT. By Osbert Sitwell. Chatto & Windus 5s. net.
At first sight this book looks like a revolutionary manifesto. Its title is vehement and original, and its paper "jacket" is decorated with the photograph of a negro head surmounted with a towering and tapering wickerwork structure. It has no bearing on the contents, and we can only assume that the author put it there because he liked it or to arrest attention. Attention having been arrested, expectation is disappointed. It is true that Mr. Sitwell often writes in vers libres, and that he opens with a challenge and hearty proclamation in the key of
Let us prune the tree of language
Of its dead fruit.
Let us melt up the clichés
Into molten metal;
Fashion weapons that will scald and flay
Let us curb this eternal humour
And become witty.
Let us dig up the dragon's teeth
From this fertile soil;
Swiftly,
Before they fructify.
And that, at a later stage, he observes that
The world itself
Dances
To make us dance
In cosmic frenzy.