Against the pearl-grey sky.
My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.

The years go fast in Oxford,
The golden years and gay,
The hoary Colleges look down
On careless boys at play.
But when the bugles sounded war
They put their games away.

They left the peaceful river,
The cricket-field, the quad,
The shaven lawns of Oxford,
To seek a bloody sod--
They gave their merry youth away
For country and for God.

God rest you, happy gentlemen,
Who laid your good lives down,
Who took the khaki and the gun
Instead of cap and gown.
God bring you to a fairer place
Than even Oxford town.

_Francis Brett Young_

Francis Brett Young, who is a novelist as well as a poet, and who has
been called, by _The Manchester Guardian_, "one of the promising
evangelists of contemporary poetry," has written much that is both
graceful and grave. There is music and a message in his lines that
seem to have as their motto: "Trust in the true and fiery spirit of
Man." Best known as a writer of prose, his most prominent works are
_Marching on Tanga_ and _The Crescent Moon_.

Brett Young's _Five Degrees South_ (1917) and his _Poems 1916-18_
(1919) contain the best of his verse.

LOCHANILAUN

This is the image of my last content:
My soul shall be a little lonely lake,
So hidden that no shadow of man may break
The folding of its mountain battlement;
Only the beautiful and innocent
Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake
Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake
Of churned cloud in a howling wind's descent.
For there shall be no terror in the night
When stars that I have loved are born in me,
And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair;
But this shall be the end of my delight:--
That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see
Your image in the mirrored beauty there.

_F. S. Flint_

Known chiefly as an authority on modern French poetry, F. S. Flint has
published several volumes of original imagist poems, besides having
translated works of Verhaeren and Jean de Bosschere.

LONDON

London, my beautiful,
it is not the sunset
nor the pale green sky
shimmering through the curtain
of the silver birch,
nor the quietness;
it is not the hopping
of birds
upon the lawn,
nor the darkness
stealing over