ree bough,
You saw books, pictures, as I see them now.
The sofa then was blue, the telephone
Listened upon the desk and softly shone
Even as now the fire-irons in the grate,
And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate
Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door
Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor
These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying ...
And then you never had a thought of dying.

How much richer, too, by this time Mr. Squire's imagery has become! His
observation is both exact and imaginative when he notes how--

the frail ash-tree hisses
With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.

Elsewhere in the same poem Mr. Squire has given us a fine new image of
the brevity of man's life:--

And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones,
Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over.

It was not, however, till _The Lily of Malud_ appeared that readers of
poetry in general realized that Mr. Squire was a poet of the imagination
even more than of the intellect. This is a flower that has blossomed out
of the vast swamps of the anthropologists. It is the song of the ritual
of initiation. Mr. Squire's power in the sphere both of the grotesque
and of lovely imagery is revealed in the triumphant close of this
poem:--

And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts
Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then,
Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin,
Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony,
Chip and grunt and do not see.

But each mother, silently,
Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut,
For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air,
A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed
With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies.
And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember
Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen
Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green:
A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour,
Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen:
Something holy in the past that came and did not last,
But she knows not what it was.

It is easy to see in the last lines that Mr. Squire has escaped finally
from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned
to express the beautiful mystery