Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/34

Rh With that he turns to enlist. It is a little difficult to guess what "Fortune pleased" may refer to. Possibly that, in sounding him this new, terrible summons, Fortune shows herself pleased to give him a new chance of retrieving whatever in his life had gone awry. The rest is touching in its sincerity, all the more for its somewhat grandiloquent address.

Wistful, hesitant, eager, boyish, yet already regretful over things done ill—all the ingenuous flutter of an ambitious but not yet fully sinewed nature—with what image shall we associate the attitude of Robert Nichols in this book? Sculpture is too definite. But a fresco in the Prytaneum. Not a large panel nor in a central place. I see a boy battling in a strong wind with a shirt from which he cannot free his wrists. Splash! splash! his companions plunge into the sea, he totters with impatience, half laughs at his own misfortune, blushes at seeming to lag behind, yet thrills at the possibility of retrieving all and being first at the goal. But many of these poems are dreamy! and was not our lad in a muse when he forgot to unbutton those wrist-bands, before pulling his shirt over his head? Look, the sky is grey, the water rough, the wind deafening; only those who swim for honour will not defer the race.

With Siegfried Sassoon we have "glad confident morning"; he does easily and well what he desires to do. His rhythms never hark back to Milton's youth as Robert Nichols' did; they stop short at John Masefield and Thomas Hardy. The longest poem is a monologue. The speaker, an old huntsman, has become inn-keeper, only to lose his savings instead of increasing them; he lazily maunders about life and religion, the point being the piquancy of vulgar notions of hell and heaven, when travestied in images drawn from his narrow round of experience with the pack and behind the bar. It might 30