A. T. QUILLER COUCH

MR. QUILLER COUCH was a poet before he left Clifton College. One of his school poems, Athens, was privately printed at Bodmin in 1881, and is treasured in the British Museum. It is not miraculous-not a Blessed Damozel -but it is remarkable work for a schoolboy. At Oxford he distinguished himself by the ingenious and spirited parodies collected (with other verses) under the title of Green Bays (1893). Up to this point, however, his verse denoted general literary capacity rather than specially poetic endowment. It is on his single volume of Poems and Ballads (1896) that his position as a poet is based, and based, I think, very firmly.

The journalist in Mr. Couch has done some injustice to the poet. It is much to be regretted that a man who can write such admirable verse should write so little. But the time that he gives to prose is not all a dead loss to poetry; for several of his short stories in Noughts and Crosses, The Delectable Duchy, and Wandering Heath, are as true poems as any in the language. My present business, however, is not with prose poems. Whatever the compensations, one cannot but regret that Mr. Couch's verse should be so scant in quantity, for in quality it is individual and often delightful. Poetry is an art which demands more leisure and a less pre-occupied mind than Mr. Couch, I suspect, is in a position to bring to it. The poet must be able to lie in

wait for his ideas and imprison them as they arise, not in mere notebook jottings, but in poetic form. When a great poem knocks at the doors of Being, it is not to be put off till a more convenient season. "Now or never" it wails, as it is reabsorbed into the vasty deep from whence it sprang. The poet who cultivates the Muse only in his leisure moments may do good work, but scarcely great. In a word, if Mr. Couch wrote more verse he would write it still better. But for what we have received I, for my part, am truly thankful.

Along with his many qualities, Mr. Couch has two limitations. The first is a lack of metrical impulse, manifesting itself in a preference for short, staccato measures, often very cunningly woven, but lacking in swing and sonority. The second limitation is an odd one in so excellent a storyteller-several of his poems do not tell their own story, or tell it but obscurely. Here is a piece, for example, which ought to be very impressive-which is impressive in its very vagueness—but would certainly have been none the worse for a little definition of outline :

SHADOWS.

As I walked out on Hallows' E'en,
I saw the moon swing thin and green;
I saw beside, in Fiddler's Wynd,
Two hands that moved upon a blind.

As I walked out on Martin's Feast,

I heard a woman say to a priest-
"His grave is digged, his shroud is sewn ;
And the child shall pass for his very own."

But whiles they stood beside his tomb,
I heard the babe laugh out in her womb-
My hair will be black as his was red,

And I have a mole where his heart bled."

There is a touch of the Border Ballad-Clerk Saunders or The Twa Corbies-in this, as in a good many others of

Mr. Couch's pieces; and their spirit is seized with excellent skill and sympathy. But the significance of the "Two hands that moved upon the blind" somehow escapes me. If Mr. Couch had hit upon a more speaking trait for this couplet, the poem would not have been less impressive for being less enigmatic. The shadow pantomime is not enough. Tennyson objected to Wordsworth's Thorn that there was too much "hammering to set a scene for so small a drama." Here Mr. Couch has fallen into the opposite error. After much wrestling with Sabina (the second poem in the book) I think I have fathomed its mystery. It is the allegory of a mother's pain on surrendering her son to the love of another woman:

The stair was steep; the Tower was tall;

Sabina's strength was gone :

She leaned a hand against the wall

And let her boy run on.

"Child! Child!" she called, and "Wait for me!"

But ever the boy's feet ran;

And up through the Whisp'ring Gallery

Came the voice of her dead man-