will to-morrow, too,
When there is none to watch, no alien eyes
To watch its ugliness assume a majesty
From this great solitude of evening skies.

So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around,
While life remains to it prepared to outface
Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries
May hide and wait for it in time and space.

_Lascelles Abercrombie_

Lascelles Abercrombie was born in 1884. Like Masefield, he gained his
reputation rapidly; totally unknown until 1909, upon the publication
of _Interludes and Poems_, he was recognized as one of the greatest
metaphysical poets of his period. _Emblems of Love_ (1912), the ripest
collection of his blank verse dialogues, justified the enthusiasm of
his admirers.

Many of Abercrombie's poems, the best of which are too long to quote,
are founded on scriptural themes, but his blank verse is not biblical
either in mood or manner. It is the undercurrent rather than the
surface of his verse which moves with a strong religious conviction.
Abercrombie's images are daring and brilliant; his lines, sometimes
too closely packed, glow with a dazzling intensity that is warmly
spiritual and fervently human.

FROM "VASHTI"

What thing shall be held up to woman's beauty?
Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all
The world, but an awning scaffolded amid
The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge
This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty?
The East and West kneel down to thee, the North
And South; and all for thee their shoulders bear
The load of fourfold space. As yellow morn
Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea,
Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men
That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears
Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love,
Whatever has been passionate in clay,
Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body
The yearnings of all men measured and told,
Insatiate endless agonies of desire
Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape!
What beauty is there, but thou makest it?
How is earth good to look on, woods and fields,
The season's garden, and the courageous hills,
All this green raft of earth moored in the seas?
The manner of the sun to ride the air,
The stars God has imagined for the night?
What's this behind them, that we cannot near,
Secret still on the point of being blabbed,
The ghost in the world