thyself, the vast
Measureless fate, full of the power of stars,
The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.

We may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men
of the stamp of Mr. Abercrombie, men for whom poetry is neither a
plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or
vague dreams; but a serious attempt to grapple with life through
combined experience, thought, and vision. Long ago Meredith urged that
if fiction was to go on living, it must give us "brain-stuff" and
"food-stuff." But no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim
for poetry; to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own
appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with
intelligence, with common sense, and with virile passion.

* * * * *

Mr. W.H. Davies stands apart from them all. I should not like to try
to account in any way for Mr. Davies any more than he could account
for a singing-bird by describing the trees among which it lived. His
poetry is unlike any other poetry that is written to-day. It is fresh
and sweet like a voice from a younger and lustier world. It is charged
with no clarion message of prophecy; it is burdened with no exactly
formulated philosophy of life. There is no rhetoric in it, no
rhodomontade. It is the melody of a man's voice singing for the
pleasure of singing, now vehemently, from the sheer delight in things
physical and outward, now sadly, as some evanescent object induces
melancholy, now in a naively reflective way, as past or future brings
memories or expectations. He never reaches quite the exquisite
melodies of Herrick, but when he writes of love he is as simple as
Herrick, and he is more direct, more heart-whole, less of the perfect
singer, perhaps, but more of the lover. If he writes with wide-eyed
wonder at the simpler marvels of life, it is in the manner of Blake
in _Songs of Innocence_, where outwardness of manner and lyrical
simplicity leave an impression of something unearthly in its
strangeness. Occasionally in the slight extravagance of his imagery we
can see that the influence of the seventeenth-century "metaphysical"
poets has not left him unscathed, as when he likens love to the
influence of spring opening up navigation.

But it is a sure instinct which has taken him to the simpler lyrical
poets and led him to mould his style on theirs. His interests lie in
the purely personal affairs of the heart; the