Mother.
Ay, the night was frosty,
Coldly gaped the moon,
Yet the birds seemed twittering
Through green boughs of June.
Soft and thick the snow lay,
Stars danced in the sky.
Not all the lambs of May-day
Skip so bold and high.
Your feet were dancing, Alice,
Seemed to dance on air,
You looked a ghost or angel
In the starlight there.
Your eyes were frosted starlight,
Your heart fire and snow.
Who was it said, "I love you"?
Alice.
Mother, let me go!
Mr. Graves resembles Mr. W. H. Davies in the quiet freshness of his best work. If he has a fault it is that he is rather too apt to point a moral. He may have caught this—along with much of his rhythmic subtlety—from his study of nursery rhymes, but there is very little of it in the present book, which is full of the most charming fancy. Perhaps Mr. Graves's most characteristic work is to be found in such a poem as Vain and Careless, which begins:
Lady, lovely lady,
Careless and gay!
Once when a beggar called
She gave her child away,