is much, too, of great promise. “The Remembered Gods,” which was written at Oxford, shows his poetic power with the great spaces, the long-ranging time, the brooding significance which are as a home to the highland imagination. In this direction, perhaps, his work might have developed notably. The shorter pieces exhibit remarkable concentration of mood and mastery of technique. The keynote varies: here the lightest play of fancy, there the broadly comic, again a haunting pain, sentiment, reverie, grimness, and unforced irony, but everywhere melody and sure movement and a delicate rightness. The war pieces, unlike many that have been written since 1914, evade the circumstance and horror of war. There is strangely little, indeed, about the war in any of them, but much about the minds and hearts of those who wage it. There shines through them a very triumph over war. This much loved gallant poet is of those whose living martyrdom rises whole-souled above the storm of violence and is humanity’s true victory. And not that martyrdom only.
Christ Church, Oxford
April 1918
