’Sweet is the music of Arabia
  In my heart, when out of dreams
  I still in the thin clear murk of dawn
  Descry her gliding streams;
  Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
  Ring loud with the grief and delight
  Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
  In the brooding silence of night. 
  They haunt me—­her lutes and her forests;
  No beauty on earth I see
  But shadowed with that dream recalls
  Her loveliness to me: 
  Still eyes look coldly upon me,
  Cold voices whisper and say—­
  “He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
  They have stolen his wits away."’

And here is a verse from Mr Squire:—­

  ’For whatever stream I stand by,
  And whatever river I dream of,
  There is something still in the back of my mind
    From very far away;
  There is something I saw and see not,
  A country full of rivers
  That stirs in my heart and speaks to me
    More sure, more dear than they.

  ’And always I ask and wonder
  (Though often I do not know it)
  Why does this water not smell like water?...’

To leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision of Mr de la Mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisite technique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability!  It remains to be added that Mr Squire is an amateur of nature,—­

  ’And skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air,
  When man first was were not the martens there?’—­

and a lover of dogs.

Mr Shanks, Mr W.J.  Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order.  They have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward kind—­and no emotional content.  One can find examples of the disastrous simile in them all.  They are all in their degree pseudo-naives.  Mr Turner wonders in this way:—­

  ’It is strange that a little mud
  Should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters,
  Should rise up and call a mountain Popocatapetl,
  And a green-leafed wood Oleander.’

Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof positive of that.  But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of the gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver.  Mr Shanks’s speciality is beauty.  He also is an amateur of nature.  He bids us:  ’Hear the loud night-jar spin his pleasant note.’  Of course, Mr Shanks cannot have heard a real night-jar.  His description is proof of that.  But again, it was a kindly thought.  Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a more interesting case, deserving detailed analysis.  For the moment we can only recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this book with ‘Sabrina Fair’ and ‘Love in a Valley’ respectively.

It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical skill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences.  Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet.  He is the splendid borrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes.  He incorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its being there and there alone.  One can see the process in the one fine poem in Wheels, Mr Wilfred Owen’s ’Strange Meeting’:—­