"And long-parched as the fields for rain withheld
Then first it was I saw you, once, twice, thrice,
And not till yet again made means to speak,"
is using his words carelessly; he is flinging monosyllables like handfuls of pebbles. Squire remarks at a rugger match:
"Each face is a story, a tragedy and a doubt;
And the teams where they wait in the sacred place to the right,
Are bewildered souls, who have heard of and brooded on death,
And thought about God. But this is a football match;
And anyhow I don't feel equal to thinking."
And certainly he is not thinking. His words are birdshot; as they scatter he only hopes that one of them will be fatal. It is a prose method, and a method of bad prose.
Certainly neither poet is negligible. Squire in his best verse threshes about like a mountain in travail; not always does he give birth to a mouse. Sometimes he lets slip avalanches to crack a nut, but not always. He has written poetry of a rare metaphysical intensity, but when he is most personal he is usually most awkward. He has written many verses which are correctly grandiloquent, like those of The Birds and The Moon; unfortunately in these verses he has rarely anything to say, and correctness has little value if one cannot apply it to expressing one’s own ideas. The same weaknesses are present in Freeman. He too is talented obviously; he has the uncommon gift of seeing the countryside with fresh eyes. He expresses himself negligently, however, and to find a good verse one reads a dozen which are insufficiently laboured. A lyric should attain nothing less than perfection, and this ideal seems to exist in his mind no more than in Squire's. If it did they would certainly never print lines like any one of a thousand I could quote:
"Dims the wick's lambent dew."
"The beauty I knew not I knew there."
"No choice was ours. We spoke and spoke not aught."
