s completely abolished as the reflexions of the mirror, beauty's relic and oblivion,' 'the soul and mystery f emptiness'? And yet what might not the mirror ecall? Not merely the eyes that gazed within it seekng its oracle, but the very soul behind them, wraiths nd apparitions of all the passions of mankind. Earth erself has her mirror, the moon, that 'sorceress of illion nights,' 'inspirer and enchantress of myriad earts,' yet sightless, deaf; 'pity she has made, but none as had.' Nay, does not this soulless glass of Mother Earth irror forth also the ultimate fate that shall overtake er and all her teeming life, reducing her to 'emptiness, ight within night, immense and issueless.' Yet this not the final answer. The soul that hath worn the sweet attire' of earth yet dwells in the glory of God's esire,' itself the end no end discerning,' transfuses world upon world, 'till all the Universe be wrought Into s far perfecting thought,'-till the microcosm of man's ind and the microcosm of the Universe become as it ere the single 'mirror of God, pure and alone,' that sees nd is seen, knows and is known. In 'The Tiger Lily,' a brilliant poem that invites far nger quotations than it is possible to give here, the Det addresses the Tiger Lily at evening as a sevenroated Flower of Fire,' e feels a strange influence arising from it and exclaims: 'Yet like some word of splendid speech hich, could we catch it, might well be the key-word of e riddle of the Universe. The poet tries to penetrate the secret of the flower's istence by dreaming his dark heart to earth,' and Vol. 232.-No. 460, L resigning his senses one by one, hoping by his intellectual KEVOIç to attain his aim, even as one might seek to learn the secret of the lilies of the field. Was there no pain or travail that went to its making, long before ' man was in his own shape'? Far, far, thou seemest as the evening star,' he cries; and yet the flower exercises over him a strange fascination, answering to some unmated' want in his soul, holding some of the mystery of his own being 'secretly yet splendidly unfolded.' The whole poem reminds one of one of those Japanese prints in which the artist has striven to enter into and reveal the very soul of the flower. No attempt to sum up the message of Laurence Binyon can afford to ignore 'The Secret,' a very remarkable poem, which so far has only appeared in magazine form in the English Review.' The poem consists of two parts. In the first part the poet, sunk in reverie learns that, though he pass through endless vicissitudes of the worlds and ages, yet 'In the end I must return, To the something alone that in each of us breathes and sleeps Profound, isolate, still, And must brave the giant world, and from hour to hour Must prove its own will; To this self, unexcused and unglorified, drawn From its fond shadows, and bare, Wherein no man that has been, none that is or shall be, Shares or ever can share. 'Alone and abandoned of all familiar uses, Itself the only place It knows, a question winged, barbed and burning Has the utter loneliness of self amid the outer loneliness of things been ever better described? It recalls the sublime eloquence of Pascal. Apostrophising the stars and the night around, he cries, 'I am strange to you, O Stars! O Night, I am your exile, Though you shall array your silences against me, Though I be but a moth in an abyss of ages, he vision changes. The poet finds himself back in the ays of his youth, in the month of May, lying in the glowing shade,' his 'very body drenched with a speechss joy' whose cause he could not divine. 'The sky was oured in singing rivers of blue,' 'like a shaking of eavenly bells Was the sound of the leaves in the tower branches blown!' The poet continues: But I knew not where my soul was; in that hour Neither time nor place it knew! It was trembling high in the topmost blossom that drank It was dark in the root that sucked of the deep earth; It was not the bird, but the bird's bright wayward wiftness,' not the flowers, but their flowering, not the nger, but the song. The poet touched his own flesh, nly to find it strange, and yet earth and sky cried, 'It is ou'; and then, unable to tell his thought from the reen of the grass, his bliss from the blue of the sky, ne poet asks himself, using the language of St Francis, Who is not my brother, and who is not my sister?' Have I passed you by, nor perceived how luminous in ou all infinity lies?'; and, penetrating the unnumbered earts of all things, he realises that his own share in all, eing neither alone nor afraid,' but throbbing in the fe that can never be destroyed 'in the things Time ever made'—or, in other words, in the universal élan tal. Under the title of The Four Years' Binyon has llected the numerous war poems in which he has corded the varying moods and sensations through hich many of us have passed during that long period national stress and strain. The simple dedication at e beginning to Richard Henry Powell, 2nd Lieut. nque Ports Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, serves an admirable proem to the whole. 'Strong, loyal-souled, full-hearted, blithely brave, this volume Binyon has come by his own, not as e poet who revels in the pomp and circumstance of war, but rather as the interpreter of that culture England which, audax omnia perpeti, has dared to suffe and to think, and by thinking has reached those ultimat truths that alone can bring abiding consolation. By a happy inspiration he has earlier poems which notably, like Downs,' heralded the coming storm. reprinted certai Thunder on th The opening wa poem entitled 'The Fourth of August' will always remai as a living document of the emotion that swept throug the nation at the outbreak of the war. 'Now in thy splendour go before us, 'The cares we hugged drop out of vision, 'For us the glorious dead have striven, We arm for men that are to be.' Truly the trumpet call of that wonderful army tha sprang as it were by a miracle from the soil whe Englishmen suddenly realised the country was in danger This splendid overture was soon followed by tw masterpieces in which the poet revealed himself as th spokesman not merely of the cultured but of all classesor rather of the whole nation. To Women' and 'Fo the Fallen ' are inscribed for ever on the heart of England As regards the first, who has hitherto ever so we described before the woman's part in war? 'Your hearts are lifted up, your hearts 'For you, you too, to battle go, Not with the marching drums and cheers, And through the boundless night of tears. 'Swift, swifter than those hawks of war, Those threatening wings that pulse the air, You are gone before them, you are there! 'And not a shot comes blind with death And entered first a woman's breast.' Equally if not indeed better known is that wonderful renody for the fallen in which the poet who in his rly 'Requiem for A. S. P.' had expressed so touchingly s sorrow for the loss of a beloved friend, now utters ■ unsurpassable verse the sorrow of a whole nation for dead: 'With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, 'Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal And a glory that shines upon our tears. "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: But it would need a separate article to do justice to e volume, which contains over sixty poems. Here we only allude to a few of the more striking, as 'The tagonists,' with its fine analysis of the soul of France. ing forth to battle, and The Bereaved,' which is a endid variant of the poem 'To Women,' and in which e lingering suspense and anguish of those at home those at the front are depicted in immortal verse. ese are perhaps the most poignant stanzas of a poem e would like to have quoted in its entirety. Oh had we failed them, then were we desolate now What should have comforted, what should have helped us then In the time of our bitter need! |
