and in these efforts sound frequently comes perilously near triumphing over sense. The exotic formal growths of other languages were imported into England. No verbal tour de force of troubadour or trouvère or jongleur or Ronsardist was too fantastic for imitation and adoption. The one-time primitive directness of English was overrun by such forms as the ballade, the chant royal, the rondel, the kyrielle, the rondeau and the rondeau redoublé, the virelai and the pantoum, the sestina, the villanelle, and last, yet by no means least, the sonnet. But through the immense tangle of our intricate lyric growths it can now be seen that mere mechanics do not always make poetry. While rhyme has, indeed, served its limited purposes, it must be remembered that the highest English verse has been written without rhyme. This verbal embroidery, while it presents to the workman in words a pleasingly decorative form, at the same time imposes on him both an adventitious restraint and an increased self-consciousness. The twentieth century poet, singing with his scrupulously polished vocalisation, usually finds himself content to re-echo what has been said before. He is unable to "travel light"; pioneering with so heavy a burden is out of the question. Rhyme and meter have compelled him to sacrifice content for form. It has left him incapable of what may be called abandonment. And the consciousness of his technical impedimenta has limited the roads along which he may adventure. His preoccupation with formal exactions has implanted in him an instinctive abhorrence for anything beyond the control of what he calls common-sense. Dominated by this emotional and intellectual timidity, he has attributed to end-rhyme and accentual rhythm the self-sufficiency of mystic rites, in the face of the fact that the fewer the obstacles between feeling and expression the richer the literary product must be, and forgetting, too, that poetry represents the extreme vanguard of consciousness both adventuring and pioneering along the path of future progress.

For the poet to turn his back on rhythm, as at times he has been able to do with rhyme, is an impossibility. For the rhythmising instinct is innate and persistent in man, standing for a law which permeates every manifestation of energy. The great heart of Nature itself beats with a regular systole and diastole. But, rhythmically, the modern versifier has been a Cubist without quite comprehending it. He has been viewing the world mathematically. He has been crowding his soul into a geometrically designed mould. He has bowed to a rule-of-thumb order of speech, arbitrarily imposed on him by an ancestry which wrung its ingenuous pleasure out of an ingenuous regularity of stress and accent. To succeed under that law he must practise an adroit form of self-deception, solemnly pretending to fit his lines to a mould which he actually over-runs and occasionally ignores. He has not been satisfied with the rhythm of Nature, whose heart-beats in their manifold expressions are omnipresent but never confined to any single sustained pulse or any one limited movement. It is not argued that he should ignore rhythm altogether. To do so, as has already been said, would be impossible, since life itself is sustained by the rise and fall of mortal breasts and the beat and throb of mortal hearts. Rhythm is in man's blood. The ear of the world instinctively searches for cadences. The poet's efforts towards symphonic phrasing have long since become habitual and imperative. But that he should confine himself to certain man-made laws of meter, that he should be shackled by the prosodian of the past, is quite another matter. His predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many accentual forms that are cunningly intricate, but at a time when his manner of singing has lost its vital swing it is well for man to forget these formal prettinesses and equally well to remember that poetry is not an intellectual exercise but the immortal soul of perplexed mortality seeking expression.

To abandon fixed rhythm, or meter, for the floating rhythm of the chant may not be an immediate solution of the problem. To follow the Psalms of David, for example, will not suddenly conjure a new school of verse into the world. But to return to the more open movement of the chant, which is man's natural and rudimentary form of song, may constitute a step towards freedom. The mere effort towards emancipation, in fact, is not without its value. It may serve to impress on certain minds the fact that poetry is capable of exhausting one particular form of expression, of incorporating and consuming one particular embodiment of perishable matter and passing on to its newer fields. Being a living organism, it uses up what lies before it, and to find new vigour must forever feed on new forms. Being the product of man's spirit, which is forever subject to change, verse must not be worshipped for what it has been, but for what it is capable of being. No necrophilic regard for its established conventions must blind the lover of beautiful verse to the fact that the primary function of poetry is both to intellectualize sensation and to elucidate emotional experience. If man must worship beauty only as he has known it in the past, man must be satisfied with worshipping that which has lived and now is dead.

A. S.

OPEN WATER

MILKWEED

I

The blue, blue sea,
And the drone of waves,
And the wheeling swallows,
And the sun on the opal sails,
And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,
And the milkweed thick at my feet,
And the milkweed held in the hand of a child
Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge,
Watching the fading sails
And the noonday blue
Of the lonely sea!

II

Was it all years ago,
Or was it but yesterday?
I only know that the scent
Of the milkweed brings it back,
Back with a strangle of tears:
The child and the misty headlands,
The drone of the dark blue sea,
And the opal sails
In the sun!

HOME THOUGHTS

I am tired of the dust
And the fever and noise
And the meaningless faces of men;
And I want to go home!
Oh, day after day I get thinking of home
Where the black firs fringe the skyline,
And the birds wheel down the silence,
And the hemlocks whisper peace,
And the hill-winds cool the blood,
And the dusk is crowned with glory,
And the lone horizon softens,
And the world's at home with God!
Oh, I want to go there!
I want to go home!

LIFE

A rind of light hangs low
On the rim of the world;
A sound of feet disturbs
The quiet of the cell
Where a rope and a beam looms high
At the end of the yard.

But in the dusk
Of that walled yard waits a woman;
And as the thing from its cell,
Still guarded and chained and bound,
Crosses that little space,
Silent, for ten brief steps,
A woman hangs on his neck.

And that walk from a cell to a sleep
Is known as Life,
And those ten dark steps
Of tangled rapture and tears
Men still call Love.

SOME DAY, O SEEKER OF DREAMS

Some day, O Seeker of Dreams, they will seek even us!
Some day they will wake, Fellow Singer, and hunger and want
For the Ways to the Lonelier Height!
So let us, Shy Weaver of Beauty, take heart,
For out of their dust they will call to us yet!
Let us wait, and