fectionately,

LYDIA PUTTENHAM

IX

The Rev. Stacey Morris to Ernest Burroughs, the compiler of the
Puttenham genealogy

MY DEAR BURROUGHS,--We are threatened with all kinds of penalties by Sir
Jonathan Puttenham, the great contractor, over your seamy revelations.
It is odd how differently these things are taken, for the other great
Puttenham, the chemist, Sir Victor, is delighted and is distributing
copies broadcast. Equal forms of snobbishness, a Thackeray would perhaps
say. But my purpose in writing is to say that I hope you will continue
the series undismayed.

Yours sincerely,

STACEY MORRIS

Poetry made Easy

In the admirable and stimulating lecture given to the English
Association by Professor Spurgeon on "Poetry in the Light of War," I
came again upon that poem of Rupert Brooke's in which he enumerates
certain material things that have given him most pleasure in life. "I
have been so great a lover," he writes, and then he makes a list of his
loves, thus following, perhaps all unconsciously, Lamb's _John Woodvil_
in that rhymed passage which, under the title "The Universal Lover," has
been detached from the play. But Lamb, pretending to be Elizabethan,
dealt with the larger splendours, whereas Rupert Brooke's modernity took
count of the smaller. John Woodvil's list of his loves begins with the
sunrise and the sunset; Rupert Brooke sets down such mundane and
domestic trifles as white plates and cups, the hard crust of bread, and
the roughness of blankets.

This, to strangers to the poem, may not sound very poetical, but they
must read it before they judge. To me it is at once one of the most
satisfying and most beautiful leaves in the Georgian anthology. Here is
a passage:

Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter too; and body's pain
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks, and shining pools on grass;
--All these have been my loves.

My reason in quoting these fine and tender lines is to point out how
simple a thing poetry can be; how easily we, at any rate for a few
moments--even the most material, the most worl