BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
POEMS, 1916–1918. By Francis Brett Young. Collins. 5s. net.
Mr. Brett Young's Marching on Tanga was the best written of all the books produced during the war by men on active service. Its imaginative quality and the charm of its style were no surprise to those who knew his early novels, of which The Dark Tower was the most notable. It has been succeeded by two other prose works, The Crescent Moon, an African story, the melodrama of which is veiled by the beautiful descriptive writing, and The Young Physician, a more naturalistic essay which was noticed in our first number. Unobtrusively, amid these other activities, he published two or three years ago a little book of verses, Five Degrees South; and in this new volume are gathered the contents of that book and the poems that their author has written more recently.
The volume is characteristically Georgian. There are hints, here and there, of musings which may develop into a general conception of the universe and of man; there are points of contact with the problems which vex the reflective spirit. But, generally speaking, Mr. Brett Young is content to sing, briefly and with deep feeling, of a few things securely loved: and those points of contact are points of departure. He writes of England—friends, landscapes, and a woman—before he leaves England. When he is in Africa the blood and struggle, the fell tropical scenery, seem but to make acuter the response to the England that is lost; and when he comes home again he sings again of home recovered and loved with a new intensity. The Gift gives the keynote of the book:
Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain,
Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,
England came to me—me who had always ta'en
But never given before—England, the giver,
In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver
On still evenings of summer, after rain,
By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver
When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.
Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,
And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake
Shivering all night through till cold daybreak.
In that I count these sufferings my gain,
And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain
Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.
That is from Africa, where he rides through marshes swarming with cruel life and admires the sickly beauty of the fever tree, but always as an alien. Then he returns: