The long series of poems called Fires (1910-11) differ in matter and manner from the earlier works. The form of drama is abandoned, and in its place we have vivid rimed narrative, mingled with glowing pictures of natural scenery, taken at all hours of the day and night. Each of his poems must be taken as a whole, for each poem strives for a single effect. This effect is often gained by taking some object, animate or inanimate, as a symbol. Thus, in The Hare, the hunted animal is the symbol of woman. The Flute, The Lighthouse, and The Money mean more than their definition. Mr. Gibson is somewhat kinder to his readers in this collection, for the monotony of woe, that hangs over his work like a cloud, is rifted here and there by a ray of happiness. In The Shop, the little boy actually recovers from pneumonia, and our share in the father's delight is heightened by surprise, for whenever any of our poet's characters falls into a sickness, we have learned to expect the worst. Still, the darker side of life remains the author's chosen field of exploration. Two pieces are so uncanny that one might almost think they proceeded from a disordered imagination. The blind boy, who every day has rowed his father back and forth from the fishing-grounds, while the man steered, one day rows cheerfully toward home, unaware that his father is dead. The boy wonders at his father's silence, and laughingly asserts that he has heard him snoring. Then his mirth changes to fear, and fear to horror.

Though none has ever known
How he rowed in, alone,
And never touched a reef.
Some say they saw the dead man steer—
The dead man steer the blind man home—
Though, when they found him dead,
His hand was cold as lead.

Another strange poem describes how a cripple sits in his room, with a mother eternally stitching for bread, and watches out of the window the giant crane swinging vast weights through the sky. One night, while he is half-dead with fear, the great crane swoops down upon him, clutches his bed, and swings him, bed and all, above the sleeping city, among the blazing stars.

Following Mr. Gibson's development as a poet, year by year, we come to Thoroughfares (1908-14). These are short poems more conventional in form than their predecessors, but just as stark and grim as chronicles of life. Every one remembers the torture inflicted on women in the good-old-times, when they were strapped to posts on the flats at low tide, and allowed to watch the cruel slowness of approaching death. The same theme, with an even more terrible termination, is selected by Mr. Gibson in Solway Ford, where the carter is pinned by the heavy, overturned wagon on the sands; while the tide gradually brings the water toward his helpless body. He dies a thousand deaths in imagination, but is rescued just as the waves are lapping the wheels. Now he lies in bed, an incurable idiot, smiling as he sees gold and sapphire fishes swimming in the water over his head…. That rarest of all English metres—which Browning chose for One Word More—is employed by Mr. Gibson in a compound of tragedy-irony called The Vindictive Staircase. Unfortunately the rhythm is so closely associated with Browning's love-poem, that these lines sound like a parody:

Mrs. Murphy, timidest of spectres,
You who were the cheeriest of charers,
With the heart of innocence and only
Torn between a zest for priest and porter,
Mrs. Murphy of the ample bosom,—
Suckler of a score or so of children.

It seems best to leave this measure in the undisturbed possession of the poet who used it supremely well. Yet some of the verses in Thoroughfares are an advance on Mr. Gibson's previous work. No reader will ever forget Wheels.

Passing over Borderlands (1912-14) which, with the exception of Akra, is the least successful of Mr. Gibson's works, we come to his most original contribution to modern poetry, the short poems included under the heading Battle (1914-15). These verses afford one more bit of evidence that in order to write unconventional thoughts, it is not necessary to use unconventional forms. The ideas expressed here can be found in no other war-poet; they are idiosyncratic to the highest degree; yet the verse-forms in which they are written are stanzaic, as traditional as the most conservative critic could desire. There is, of course, no reason why any poet should not compose in new and strange rhythms if he prefers to do so; but I have never believed that originality in thought necessarily demands metrical measures other than those found in the history of English literature.

These lyrical poems are dramatic monologues. Each one is the testimony of some soldier in the thick of the fight as to what he has seen or heard, or as to what memories are strongest in his mind as he lies in the filth of the trenches. Conventional emotions of enthusiasm, glory, sacrifice, courage, are omitted, not because they do not exist, but simply because they are taken for granted; these boys are aflame with such feelings at the proper time. But Mr. Gibson is more interested in the strange, fantastic thoughts, waifs of memory, that wander across the surface of the mind in the midst of scenes of horror. And we feel that the more fantastic these thoughts are, the more do they reflect the deep truths of experience. Home naturally looms large, and some of the recollections of home take on a grim humour, strangely in contrast with the present environment of the soldier.

HIS FATHER

I quite forgot to put the spigot in.
It's just come over me…. And it is queer
To think he'll not care if we lose or win.
And yet be jumping-mad about that beer.