Mr. Harvey's first book, A Gloucestershire Lad, appeared when he was in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in getting himself naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr. Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself; and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common), lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity. The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:
From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks,
Beautiful comical things,
Sleeping or curled,
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool.
Or finding curious things
To eat in various mucks
Beneath the pool,
Tail uppermost, or waddling
Sailor-like on the shores
Of ponds, or paddling.
He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable, and stack:
They wander at their will,
But if you go too near
They look at you through black
Small topaz-tinted eyes
And wish you ill.
On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes:
And he's probably laughing still at the sound that came out of his bill.
Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest. Requiescat is a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the idea does not prevent Song from lingering in the memory more than anything else in the volume:
Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart,
Shall fall upon my heart;
Nor will I strive to mimic
The beauty that I find,
But lie in a dream and open wide my heart
And let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.
This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.