Then the moon came quiet and flooded full Light and beauty on clouds like wool, On a feasted fox at rest from hunting, In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting.
The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night, With moonlight fallen in pools of light, The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed, A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed.
THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By SIR WILLIAM WATSON. Hodder & Stoughton. 6_s._ net.
Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it; and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and Ahriman) we find lines like
Legible haply in that brow benign. Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons With the huge monster's dragon armature, Out of the pregnant and parturient dust Large hereditaments of bliss and woe,
sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would not have been poorer had none of them been written.
MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By ARTHUR WALEY. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ and 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Waley's 170 _Chinese Poems_ (Constable) was one of the most memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at sight that they were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one; those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one. In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood; and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We may quote two shorter examples. One is _The Cranes_, which has the terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine: