They took the violet and the meadow-sweet
To form her pretty face, and for her feet
They built a mound of daisies on a wing,
And for her voice they made a linnet sing
In the wide poppy blowing for her mouth.
And over all they chanted twenty hours.
And Llew came singing from the azure south
And bore away his wife of birds and flowers.'

It is fragile, a thing partly of the fancy; it has not the vivid and intimate contact with reality that was to make some of the later songs of such fine bearing in their little compass, but it is a lovely device, surely made. There are three other poems in this first volume that may be chosen for their rounded achievement as distinct from occasional excellence : 'The Coming Poet' (though the first stanza is hardly good enough for the second), 'Evening in February,' and ' Growing Old,' with its perfect conclusion:

'Across a bed of bells the river flows,

And roses dawn, but not for us; we want
The new thing ever as the old thing grows
Spectral and weary on the hills we haunt.
And that is why we feast, and that is why

We're growing odd and old, my heart and I.'

Songs of the Fields' is a book full of expectancy. The reader leaves it in the assurance of an impulse that will overcome all its difficulties, and break presently from hesitant and alloyed grace into sure and bright authority. The development came, beautifully, and, in a few happy moments of complete liberation, to the height of promise, but it was won with tragic difficulty in the preoccupation into which the poet was called, and in which he was finally to perish. 'Songs 'of Peace,' issued after an interval of a year, and presumably containing work most of which was written in that time, opens with Ledwidge's longest poem, 'A Dream of Artemis.' Here and there are slack lines, as, ' Such music fills me with 'a joy half pain,' and the poem generally, although it has dignity, and although its Hymn to Zeus,' has lovely touches in it, is unimportant in the body of the poet's work. From a word in Lord Dunsany's preface, however, we gather it to be of earlier composition than the rest of the book. The

short lyric, 'A Little Boy in the Morning,' has a first verse of lucky gaiety that is hardly maintained in the second. Then follows a series of poems under divisional headings, In 'Barracks,' 'In Camp,'' At Sea,' 'In Serbia,' and so on, in which for many pages disappointment seems to be the destined end of our hopes. Still we have the frequent witness that here is a poet of the true endowment :

'The skylark in the rosebush of the dawn,'

a beautiful image that he uses twice, by the way-or the right sort of particularity in :

'Dew water on the grass,
A fox upon the stile .

but still the full and easy realization of the manifest gift is deferred. The earlier blemishes are seldom present-it is but once and again we come across words of such relaxed imagination as 'filigree,' and yet the positive advance in creation waits. Then, towards the end of the book, we come to a poem headed, Thomas McDonagh,' of which Lord Dunsany says, 'Rather than attribute curious sympathies 'to this brave young Irish soldier, I would ask his readers 'to consider the irresistible attraction that a lost cause has 'for almost any Irishman.' The political equation in the matter does not concern us here, nor does it concern anybody in the presence of what happens to be Ledwidge's first encompassing of profound lyric mastery. Its occasion was, certainly enough, an accident; we know that these enfranchisements of the spirit are dependent upon no outward circumstance. Here is the poem :

'He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.

'Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro' slanting snows her fanfare shrill,

Blowing to flame the golden cup

Of many an upset daffodil.

'But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor,
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,
Perhaps he'll hear her low at morn

Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.'

The first stanza seems to me to be flawless, the second to have one slightly insensitive phrase-fanfare shrill-and an epithet in the last line that, while it is exactly appropriate, is somehow not perfectly used, while in the last stanza the precisely significant 'greedy weeds' falls doubtfully on the ear. For the rest, it is a poem of that limpid austerity that comes only from minds slowly but irresistibly disciplined to truth. Its inspiration is a quality that, while it is immeasurably precious to those who can perceive it, escapes the sense of many altogether. It has mystery, but it is the mystery of clear modulation and simple confidence, not that other mystery of half-whispered reticence and the veiled image; it is at once lucid and subtle, and it has the repose of vision, not of fortunate dream; it is of the noon, not of the dusk. Preferences in these matters are temperamental; there will always be many more to divine the spirit of wonder in the depths and distances of a Corot than in the flat perspicuousness of a Cotman, but for some the very ecstasy of revelation is touched by the Norwich drawing-master. So it is with poetry; the shy song, the shadow-haunted, with its ghostly quavers and little reluctances, makes its own gentle and enchanted appeal, but for some of us it often leaves halfcreated what in intention was but to be half-said. For us, the power of presenting, in hard and definite outline, experience perfectly adjusted by the imagination to figures of reality, with imagery that never denies its relation to some intellectual concept and design by claiming sufficiency for itself, is the most hardly won and richest gift of poetry. It was to this power that Ledwidge's development moved, in the poem just quoted, where he comes first to its unquestionable exercise. Like all fine verse, it needs to be read not in silence only, but also aloud.

From this point in Songs of the Fields' we have two other poems, The Wedding Morning' and 'September,' of, perhaps, as rare a quality, and two others, 'Thro' Bogac Ban' and The Blackbirds,' of almost equal attainment, and in 'Last Songs' at least half the poems are written with assured

lyric maturity and lightness. Autumn,' ' Pan,' 'To One 'Who Comes Now and Then,' and 'Had I a Golden Pound,' are, it may be, the most striking of them. This is the lastnamed:

'Had I a golden pound to spend,

My love should mend and sew no more.
And I would buy her a little quern
Easy to turn on the kitchen floor.

'And for her windows curtains white,
With birds in flight and flowers in bloom,
To face with pride the road to town,
And mellow down her sunlit room.

'And with the silver change we'd prove
The truth of Love to life's own end,
With hearts the years could but embolden,
Had I a golden pound to spend.'

The book, which, as a whole, is decidedly the poet's best, has little of the war in it, and only once, in the charming 'Soliloquy,' is there a martial note, and there it is sounded in a slightly conventional contrast with a gayer mood. His songs, here as in the beginning, are almost always of the quiet fields of Ireland or the quiet fields of the mind, and his tenderness for this tranquil and fertile world was not, as it has so often and less significantly been, the fruit of reaction against the squalor and confusion of war. He went to France bearing it in his heart, and there it prospered, in witness of his natural vocation, until he was killed.

Such a gift as that of a few lovely lyrics was at no time greatly esteemed by the world, and in these days, although love of beauty is by no means rare, indifference often smoulders into open hostility. And yet the world's esteem is so little a thing, and beauty so durable, asking but a little companionship. Ledwidge's poems gain nothing from that other gift that he so devotedly gave, that we so forlornly receive. That the world should spend a poet so may be the tragic necessity of the time's folly, and the poet himself least of all would make dispute about it. But nothing justifies the world's pitiable pretence that in making the supreme sacrifice the poet exalts and sanctifies his art; nothing is meaner

than the appropriation to our own hearts of the glory of the soldier's death-a glory which is his alone. It is ours to keep him in remembrance, to realize, it may be, the courage that was his; but the continual insistence not that his devotion is splendid, but that it is upon us that his devotion may splendidly bestow itself, is contemptible. Ledwidge died heroically that I can reflect with deep reverence; that he died for me I can remember only in forlorn desolation and silence. But his poetry exults me, while not so his death. And it is well for us to keep our minds fixed on this plain fact, that when he died a poet was not transfigured, but killed, and his poetry not magnified, but blasted in its first flowering. People, says Lord Dunsany in a letter, 'seemed to think that one poet 'dead more or less didn't much matter.' So many people, indeed, find in a poet's untimely death an emotional excitement, which if they were honest with themselves they would have to confess was far from being wholly unhappy, that is more vivid than anything else that they ever get from poetry at all, and if the untimely death is also a noble one, yet more punctual is this facile compassion for the arts. But to those who know what poetry is, the untimely death of a man like Ledwidge is nothing but calamity. There are indeed poets who, dying young with what seems measureless promise unrealized, we may yet feel to have so far outrun the processes of nature in early achievement that the vital spirit could no longer support the strain. Keats was such a one; the constructional perfection of the odes alone bears witness to an intellectual disciplining of genius so far beyond the normal reach of what was but boyhood, that nature had to sink exhausted under the pressure, and there was, perhaps, little of unhappy accident in the stroke that was but an inevitable squaring of the account. In other words, I cannot but think, however profitless such surmise may be, that if Keats had lived to mature manhood, the poetry of his first youth would have been of far less grandeur than it is. But nothing of this can be said of Ledwidge. His development was slow, and, while it was certain enough, it moved with no remarkable concentration nor to fierce purposes. He was cultivating his glowing lyrical gift with tranquil deliberation to exquisite ends, and nothing is clearer than that