IN TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS"

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk,

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;

War's annals will fade into night

Ere their story die.

THE DARKLING THRUSH

I leaned upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings from broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant;

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice burst forth among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy unlimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Has chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang, critic and essayist, was born in 1844 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Besides his many wellknown translations of Homer, Theocritus and the Greek Anthology, he has published numerous biographical works.

As a poet, his chief claim rests on his delicate light verse. Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), Ballades in Blue China (1880), and Rhymes à la Mode (1884) disclose Lang as a lesser Austin Dobson.

SCYTHE SONG

Mowers, weary and brown and blithe,
What is the word, methinks, ye know,
Endless over-word that the Scythe

Sings to the blades of the grass below?
Scythes that swing in the grass and clover,
Something, still, they say as they pass;
What is the word that, over and over,
Sings the Scythe to the flowers and grass?

Hush, ah, hush, the Scythes are saying,
Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep;
Hush they say to the grasses swaying;
Hush they sing to the clover deep!
Hush 'tis the lullaby Time is singing-

Hush and heed not for all things pass;
Hush, ah, hush! and the Scythes are swinging
Over the clover, over the grass!

Robert Bridges

Robert (Seymour) Bridges was born in 1844 and educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After traveling extensively, he studied medicine in London and practiced until 1882. Most of his poems, like his occasional plays, are classical in tone as well as treatment. He was appointed poet laureate in 1913, following Alfred Austin. His command of the secrets of rhythm, especially exemplified in Shorter Poems (1894), through a subtle versification give his lines a firm delicacy and beauty of pattern.

WINTER NIGHTFALL

The day begins to droop,-
Its course is done:
But nothing tells the place

Of the setting sun.

The hazy darkness deepens,

And up the lane

You may hear, but cannot see,

The homing wain.

An engine pants and hums
In the farm hard by:
Its lowering smoke is lost
In the lowering sky.

The soaking branches drip,
And all night through
The dropping will not cease

In the avenue.

A tall man there in the house Must keep his chair:

He knows he will never again Breathe the spring air:

His heart is worn with work; He is giddy and sick

If he rise to go as far

As the nearest rick:

He thinks of his morn of life,

His hale, strong years; And braves as he may the night Of darkness and tears.

The Irish-English singer, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, was born in London in 1844. He was connected, for a while, with the British Museum, and was transferred later to the Department of Natural History. His first literary success, Epic of Women (1870), promised a brilliant future for the young poet, a promise strengthened by his Music and Moonlight (1874). Always delicate in health, his hopes were dashed by periods of illness and an early death in London in 1881.

The poem here reprinted is not only O'Shaughnessy's best but is, because of its perfect blending of music and message, one of the immortal classics of our verse.

ODE

We are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story

We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.