I take the liberty of italicizing these last five words. They are the strong esoteric of poetry. Truly the sinews of the mighty line are still as robust as when Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs.

Allied to this power of striking down his subject like a hawk is his sparse use of comparison, except under sharp provocation. An inferior poet may very well be pinned down by the number of "likes" he uses. Davies does not say so-and-so is like so-and-so, but so-and-so is so-andso. All great poetry pursues this shorter cut of identification, and the Bible is particularly rich in concrete personification: "My harpe also is turned to mourning and my organe into the voyce of them that weepe." This is a simple example:

"The Moon, that casts her beam

Upon the hill's dark crest,

Is Kitty's whiter arm,

Across my hairy breast."

-not Kitty's arm which is whiter than, etc., or Kitty's arm is as white as the moon which, etc. But the bores deeper than this :

process

I think of that Armada whose puffed sails,
Greedy and large, came swallowing every cloud."

How easily might that expressive directness be teased out into another half a dozen lines of imagery! One remembers Shelley's "Skylark" where the lark has such a train of beautifully decorative similes that the mind becomes disorientated, the unity of the poem is lost in its detail, and the lark turns into a kite with a paper tail.

Another point which qualifies the conception of Davies

as the poet of simplicity and green lanes is his love of the strange and wonderful, sometimes even of the exotic. His poems of the sea, which are certainly among his finest, are salt with the spell of far continents; their music and expression expand and flood those inward lakes on which "Sweet Stay-at-Home, Sweet Well-Content" plies her joyful little skiff :

Or:

This sailor knows of wondrous lands afar,

More rich than Spain, when the Phoenicians shipped
Silver for common ballast, and they saw
Horses at silver mangers eating grain.”

"And how the sea's sharp needles, firm and strong,
Ripped open the bellies of big iron ships;
Of mighty icebergs in the Northern seas,
That haunt the far horizon like white ghosts,
He told of waves that lift a ship so high
That birds could pass from starboard unto port
Under her dripping keel."

But perhaps the most interesting thing of all about Davies is his unconscious sense of literal tradition. (What a fetich it is with the man-I hear the faint voice of X, settling like a hawk down from the clouds.) Sometimes he seems to me like a flute, through which the lips of dead poets play their airs. His poetry seems comprehensible at first sight; not complex, nor evasive, nor challenging to critical inquiry; at the same time it can be strange and singular. What phenomenon is this of a poetry that walks straight out of the Elizabethan song-books into this questioning, weary, ratiocinative, mildewed age, where

everything seems to be at an end and where as yet there are but confused signs of a new beginning? Even our greatest modern poets have some concern with their age -either making it or being made by it, brazening it out or abusing it. Neither on his weakest nor on his strongest side has Davies any (his sympathy with the poor does not qualify the statement). Surely a derelict strayed from that age" when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy." He is haunted with no doubts and pestered with no problems; he sings more cunningly than the thrush-but it seems to be with his unpremeditated rapture. Truly a robin "half-way up his legs in snow":

"Robin on a leafless bough,

Lord in Heaven, how he sings!"

For Davies has an extraordinary affinity with the poets of the Renaissance. Not only in theme or in melody or in the peculiar fluency and lyrical aptness of his song, but, without losing any individuality, in a very marriage of phrase. The first stanza of “The Weeping Child "

"What makes thee weep so, little child :

What cause hast thou for all this grief?
When thou art old much cause may be,

And tears will bring thee no relief ”.

expresses sentiment for sentiment, and not very far from word for word, Greene's famous lines:

"Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,

When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee.”

At times he reminds one of Campion, at times of Heywood, at times ("Dreams of the Sea") even of Shakespeare. One catches in his unfaltering numbers strains of Marvell, of the Caroline lyrists, and very occasionally, and in a chance idiom, of Wordsworth. Yet all this is with him purely intuition.

It is a curious irony of time and a queer inversion of the legend of Tithonus. But I question whether this curiosity is not deceptive; Man, as artist, is ultimately always face to face with Life; the miseries and progresses which machinery and governments impose upon him are but externals. The past dies, and perhaps should die, but the universal poetic art of the past lives for ever, and asserts the brotherhood not only of countries but of centuries. Not the least part of the unforgettable service which Davies has done this generation is to present that past to us as a living reality in itself, a living and organic tie with the present, and a promise for the future.

All these things one feels about these lyrics and something more-good humour. He puts a man on terms with the world. The sun shines-there are a lot of dogs, warblers, and simple people in the world. One's generation is an invalid, not an ogre. There are not a few strutting people who do their best to turn it into an ogre, but they do not actually beat a réveillé on your door-knocker, though, by heaven, they soon will. Humanity is a farmyard, and only the landowner exacts rent from it. And to my startled mind comes a conception of the attar of all Utopias and El Dorados and Avalons and Cockaignes and Thelemas. Why not leave humanity alone?

XXXVII

SUNDRY PROVERBS AND EPITAPHS

MY DEAR X,

Taking it for granted that you do not object to casual explorations amid the minor constellations "not quite so fair as many are," but each star with its own subdued lustre, I will in this letter remind you of Camden. A year or so ago I picked up for a couple of shillings 66 a fine tall copy" (to use the jargon of the booksellers) of "Camden's Remaines " (1637). I bought it because it was cheap, in excellent condition, and as a libation to the goddess Bibliophila. To read? Say to skate over. It was the piety of the collector rather than the voracity of the reader that disburdened my purse. Then a few weeks afterwards I took it out to have a look at it, much in the spirit of the late Pierpont Morgan handling a fifteenth-century German Commentary of the Apocrypha, clothed like a phoenix. And lo! Here was Harmsworth's Encyclopædia of Knowledge, except that it did not happen to be a Tinned Tabernacle for the Acolytes of Business Results. It contains such a variety of exciting material (Languages, Names, Surnames, Allusions, Epigrammes, Ceremonies, Monies, Empreses-i.e. mottoes, Apparell, Artillerie, Wise Speeches, Proverbes, and Epitaphes are a few of the chapter headings) that I can only