Therefore they rather put away desire,

And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary, And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire; Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be;

Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm and secure; with faces worn and mild;
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;

But there, besides the altar, there, is rest.

"NON SUM QUALIS ERAM BONE SUB REGNO CYNARÆ

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

VAIN HOPE

Sometimes, to solace my sad heart, I say,
Though late it be, though lily-time be past,
Though all the summer skies be overcast,
Haply I will go down to her, some day,

And cast my rests of life before her feet,
That she may have her will of me, being so sweet
And none gainsay!

So might she look on me with pitying eyes,
And lay calm hands of healing on my head;
"Because of thy long pains be comforted;
For I, even I, am Love; sad soul, arise!"

So, for her graciousness, I might at last
Gaze on the very face of Love, and hold him fast
In no disguise.

Haply, I said, she will take pity on me,

Though late I come, long after lily-time,

With burden of waste days and drifted rhyme:

Her kind, calm eyes, down drooping maidenly,
Shall change, grow soft: there is yet time, meseems,
I said, for solace; though I know these things are dreams,
And may not be!

VILLANELLE OF MARGUERITES

"A little, passionately, not at all?”
She casts the snowy petals on the air;

And what care we how many petals fall?

Nay, wherefore seek the seasons to forestall?
It is but playing, and she will not care,

A little, passionately, not at all!

She would not answer us if we should call Across the years; her visions are too fair; And what care we how many petals fall!

She knows us not, nor recks if she enthrall With voice and eyes and fashion of her hair, A little, passionately, not at all!

Knee-deep she goes in meadow-grasses tall, Kissed by the daisies that her fingers tear; And what care we how many petals fall!

We pass and go; but she shall not recall
What men we were, nor all she made us bear;
"A little, passionately, not at all!”

And what care we how many petals fall!

A LAST WORD

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;
The day is overworn, the birds all flown;

And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown; Despair and death's deep darkness o'er the land Broods like an owl; we cannot understand

Laughter or tears, for we have only known
Surpassing vanity; vain things alone

Have driven our perverse and aimless band.

Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,
To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust
Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,
Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.
Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfoid
Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust

RICHARD MIDDLETON

[RICHARD MIDDLETON, born 1889, died at Brussels in 1911. His work, during his life, was published in various periodicals. Three volumes of prose, The Ghost Ship, Monologues, and The Day before Yesterday, containing essays and short stories, were collected after his death. Two volumes of verse, Poems and Songs, first and second series, were also posthumously published in 1912 and 1913, by Fisher Unwin.]

The mind of a great poet is a mirror endowed with the power of collecting the diffused and broken light of experience and reverberating it in one bright focal ray of consummated expression. Good poetry is always an account of facts, whether facts of the senses, or of thought and passion and imagination. It is not a collection of vague phrases and unbodied verbiage, but a significant expression of truth. But there is also a kind of simulation poetry, which is an art of making phrases, of linking shadowy, inaccurate words into a melody. This rhetoric a gradus may teach; and by a man of talent it may be brought to a certain specious perfection, from which only time and the ravages of criticism will rub the dazzle and the gilt. At its best, the poetry of words may drug and intoxicate the senses. It can never hope to appeal to any higher faculty.

The work of Richard Middleton belongs to both these categories. Some of his writing may be classed with true poetry; some, and perhaps it is the greater part, with the sham variety. At his most inspired, he displays clarity of thought and sincere emotion, clothed in melody that is sweet, sometimes to overripeness. At his worst, he trusts to vaguely "poetical" words and a copious use of not too significant images to cover the defects in the substance of his poetry. His bad verse is like a piece of music, blurred into husky sweetness by some indifferent player who relies for his effects rather on the pedal than on a clean and skilful execution. The fine intricacies of truth, which a great poet labours exactly to express, are by Middleton too often confounded and smudged into a rhetorical dimness, where outlines are lost in a welter of sensuous words.

It is not hard to find examples of Middleton's rhetorical vagueness and exuberance. His poems abound in such phrases as

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"stained by the wine of our old ecstasy,' 'moonlit lilies of the past,' " "domes of desire and secret halls of sin." They are powdered with "the dust of dreams," and on their smooth tide of harmony swims many a 'dreamy ship," many an "argosy" freighted with no poetical treasure beyond its own sonorous name. The use of words without significant content, intoxicating substitutes for thought, has been the bane of almost every mental activity. Not least has poetry suffered. Beautiful as, in its way, rhetoric may be, it is nevertheless a degraded form of poetry.

Of the earth and of the fire, earthly and fiery, Middleton's best poems are the expression of a passionate paganism. This present world is enough for us, he says, and a man may satisfy his soul with the good things of it, kisses and wine and sunlight. He bids us pluck the roses of the day, adding no philosophic caution as to the limitation of desires. In passion the extreme is the only mean, and, for him, the ideal life is one of continual passion, of unceasing and ecstatic enjoyment of the here and now. If the spirit has any thirst for the infinite, it must satisfy itself in the boundlessness of passion. He has not the vision of the mystic who looks through the beauties of this world into a divine beauty beyond them. To his eyes the things of the earth are opaque, solid, complete in themselves. They are divine, not as being symbols of some universal spirit, but because of the earth-born divinity within themselves-tutelary nymph or little goat-foot genius of the place. Passion, then, and the warm immediacy of paganism are the themes upon which Middleton works. He gives them expression in a rich voluptuous form, that is apt, as we have seen, to decay to mere verbal luxuriance.

The metrical skill displayed in all the poems is considerable, though the range of the musical effects at which Middleton aims is a narrow one. Smoothness and sweetness of numbers, melodies that will sing themselves as they run-these are the characteristics of Middleton's verse. Many of the metrical devices adapted by the nineteenth century from Elizabethan usage are to be met with in his poems. Such balanced phrases of rhythm as,

or as,

"" For I have learnt too many things to live,

And I have loved too many things to die,"

"And there is earth upon my eyes
And earth upon my singing lips,"

illustrate the successful use of one of the most pleasing of these musical artifices.

ALDOUS HUXLEY.