"Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine, Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing And lay ghost hands on everything, But leave the noonday's warm sunshine To living lads for mirth and wine.
I met you suddenly down the street, Strangers assume your phantom faces, You grin at me from daylight places, Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet Dead men down the morning street."
"[But may] the gift of heavenly peace And glory for all time Keep the boy Tom who tending geese First made the nursery rhyme."
Only in the contemplation of childish toys can he regain repose. But nursery rhymes and childish toys are as flimsy as gossamer, the latter too easily get broken, the former are too often patently absurd.
There is a gnat-like thinness even in this delicious little song:
"Small gnats that fly In hot July And lodge in sleeping ears, Can rouse therein A trumpet's din With Day-of-Judgment fears.
Small mice at night Can wake more fright Than lions at midday. An urchin small Torments us all Who tread his prickly way.
A straw will crack The camel's back, To die we need but sip, So little sand As fills the hand Can stop a steaming ship.
One smile relieves A heart that grieves Though deadly sad it be, And one hard look Can close the book That lovers love to see."
He listens to the pale-bearded Janus, who urges him to
"Sing and laugh and easily run Through the wide waters of my plain, Bathe in my waters, drink my sun, And draw my creatures with soft song; They shall follow you along Graciously with no doubt or pain."
So he extols the simple rhymes that we learnt in childhood's days and seeks to add to them.
"So these same rhymes shall still be told To children yet unborn, While false philosophy growing old Fades and is killed by scorn."
Unfortunately it is not given to any modern to imitate with any degree of success either the ballads our ancestors loved or the nursery rhymes which all children have learnt: this age is too sophisticated and this avenue of escape is denied to Mr Graves: one of the lessons that we find most painful in the learning is that we are the product of our own age and cannot get away from it. Mr Graves anticipates his reviewers in his _L'Envoi_ when he says:
"Everything they took from my new poem book But the fly-leaf and the covers."