"Then when the summer evenings fall serene,
Unto the country dance his songs repair,
And you may meet some maids with angel mien,
Bright eyes and twilight hair.'

To these may be added

'And when the sunny rain drips from the edge
Of midday wind, and meadows lean one way...'

and the thought of April who

'Will have a cuckoo on her either shoulder...'

and the slight, surprising, mastery of

'I watch an apple-spray

Beckon across a wall as if it knew

I wait the calling of the orchard maid.'

It is interesting to note that of the half-dozen or so poems in 'Songs of the Fields' that have a legendary or historical source, all but one have little to distinguish them from the exercises of a true poet, while that one is, unexpectedly, the most completely successful poem in the volume. The explanation is, probably, that the set subjectmatter at once subdued the natural play of his genius, and, by keeping him intent on an external responsibility, held him from the excesses to which he was yet liable in his freer meditation. And so, when with such a theme his faculty did for once break through restraint and soar above the occasion, as it did in 'The Wife of Llew,' he wrote what seems to me, if the arrangement of the book is significant, to be his first delicate masterpiece:

"They took the violet and the meadow-sweet
To form her pretty face, and for her feet
They built a mound of daisies on a wing,
And for her voice they made a linnet sing
In the wide poppy blowing for her mouth.
And over all they chanted twenty hours.
And Llew came singing from the azure south
And bore away his wife of birds and flowers.'

It is fragile, a thing partly of the fancy; it has not the vivid and intimate contact with reality that was to make some of the later songs of such fine bearing in their little compass, but it is a lovely device, surely done. There are three other poems in this first volume that may be chosen for their rounded achievement as distinct from occasional excellence: 'The Coming Poet' (though the first stanza is hardly good enough for the second), 'Evening in February,' and 'Growing Old,' with its perfect conclusion:

'Across a bed of bells the river flows,

And roses dawn, but not for us; we want
The new thing ever as the old thing grows
Spectral and weary on the hills we haunt.
And that is why we feast, and that is why
We're growing odd and old, my heart and I.'

'Songs of the Fields' is a book full of expectancy. The reader leaves it in the assurance of an impulse that will overcome all its difficulties, and break presently from hesitant and alloyed grace into sure and bright authority. The development came, beautifully, and, in a few happy moments of com

plete liberation, to the height of promise, but it was won with tragic difficulty in the preoccupation into which the poet was called, and in which he was finally to perish. 'Songs of Peace,' issued after an interval of a year, and presumably containing work most of which was written in that time, opens with Ledwidge's longest poem, 'A Dream of Artemis.' Here and there are slack lines, as, 'Such music fills me with a joy half pain,' and the poem generally, although it has dignity, and although its 'Hymn to Zeus,' has lovely touches in it, is unimportant in the body of the poet's work. From a word in Lord Dunsany's preface, however, we gather it to be of earlier composition than the rest of the book. The short lyric, ‘A Little Boy in the Morning,' has a first verse of lucky gaiety that is hardly maintained in the second. Then follows a series of poems under divisional headings, 'In Barracks,' 'In Camp,' 'At Sea,' 'In Serbia,' and so on, in which for many pages disappointment seems to be the destined end of our hopes. Still we have the frequent witness that here is a poet of the true endowment:

"The skylark in the rosebush of the dawn,'

a beautiful image that he uses twice, by the way or the right sort of particularity in

but still the full and easy realization of the manifest

gift is deferred. The earlier blemishes are seldom present it is but once and again we come across words of such relaxed imagination as 'filigree,' and yet the positive advance in creation waits. Then, towards the end of the book, we come to a poem headed, “Thomas McDonagh,' of which Lord Dunsany says, 'Rather than attribute curious sympathies to this brave young Irish soldier, I would ask his readers to consider the irresistible attraction that a lost cause has for almost any Irishman.' The political equation in the matter does not concern us here, nor does it concern anybody in the presence of what happens to be Ledwidge's first encompassing of profound lyric mastery. Its occasion was, certainly enough, an accident; we know that these enfranchisements of the spirit are dependent upon no outward circumstance. Here is poem:

the

'He shall not hear the bittern cry

In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.

'Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro' slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden cup

Of many an upset daffodil.

'But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor,
And pastures poor with greedy weeds,

Perhaps he'll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.'

The first stanza seems to me to be flawless, the second to have one slightly insensitive phrase — 'fanfare shrill' and an epithet in the last line that, while it is exactly appropriate, is somehow not perfectly used, while in the last stanza the precisely significant 'greedy weeds' falls doubtfully on the ear. For the rest, it is a poem of that limpid austerity that comes only from minds slowly but irresistibly disciplined to truth. Its inspiration is a quality that, while it is immeasurably precious to those who can perceive it, escapes the sense of many altogether. It has mystery, but it is the mystery of clear modulation and simple confidence, not that other mystery of half-whispered reticence and the veiled image; it is at once lucid and subtle, and it has the repose of vision, not of fortunate dream; it is of the noon, not of the dusk. Preferences in these matters are temperamental; there will always be many more to divine the spirit of wonder in the depths and distances of a Corot than in the flat perspicuousness of a Cotman, but for some the very ecstasy of revelation is touched by the Norwich drawing-master. So it is with poetry; the shy song, the shadow-haunted, with its ghostly quavers and little reluctances, makes its own gentle and enchanted appeal, but for some of us it often leaves half-created what in intention was but to be halfsaid. For us, the power of presenting, in hard and definite outline, experience perfectly adjusted by