Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/338

276 poems, 'The Amateur'—but that time is not now, and, meanwhile, he faces the facts as he finds them. This facing of facts leads him to an almost brutal frankness in his treatment of the girl and her man whom he sees dining together in a cheap restaurant and sketches with a merciless, bizarre realism in 'Apollo in Soho'; but there is tenderness as well as truth in 'Retrospect' and 'The Parting,' and there is the love and longing a man has for the home he has left in 'The Song of an Exile,' written while he was in England:

I have seen the Cliffs of Dover,

And the White Horse on the Hill;

I have walked the lanes, a rover;

I have dreamed beside the rill;

I have known the fields awaking

To the gentle touch of Spring,

The joy of morning breaking,

And the peace your twilights bring.

But I long for a sight of the pines, and the blue shadows under;

For the sweet-smelling gums, and the throbbing of African air;

For the sun and the sand, and the sound of the surf's ceaseless thunder,

The height, and the breadth, and the depth, and the nakedness there....