Or with thy splendid wrath inflate the Thy voice, though deeper, yet so like his

CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE POETRY

In 1908 John Millington Synge, in a preface of great significance, said, "The strong things of life are needed in poetry . . . to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood." And he added in words that have since become famous, "before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal." This protest against the more "literary" and academic in poetry, both in subject and treatment, is only another evidence of the reaction against the poetic conventions of the preceding age. But it points to one of the most significant developments in recent literature.

Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,

The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—

Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum of the earth.

So wrote John Masefield, and in 1911 he published The Everlasting Mercy, quickly followed by The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), Dauber (1912), and The Daffodil Fields (1913). These four remarkable narrative poems startled the world with their themes of sailors, drunken men and the like, and their portrayal of the sordid and brutal in unexpectedly colloquial language. Yet even before this, W. W. Gibson had published The Stonefolds (1907) and Daily Bread (1910), each a series of short narrative poems portraying dramatic moments in the lives of common men, and W. E. Henley over ten years before had written of bus drivers, orderlies, scrubwomen, and the slums. T. E. Brown was portraying scenes and characters among the peasantry of the Isle of Man, and Kipling had put into poetry the British soldier in India. It is evident that poetry has spread into new fields and has enlarged its scope to include subjects formerly thought unpoetical. This insistence on realism, interest in poverty, and emphasis upon the ugly, the rude, and the repulsive as essential facts of life, must be considered one of the outstanding contributions to literature made by the narrative poetry of today.

It must not be thought, however, that recent poetry has but this one string to its narrative bow. As in the lyric, it is rich and varied, ranging in matter from the romantic themes of Alfred Noyes to the stories of medieval romance and classical legend represented in the following pages by Laurence Binyon and T. Sturge Moore. But whatever the subject, the treatment is marked by directness and simplicity, concreteness and dramatic force, that suggest the vigor of life.

Of her who shone the sole light of his Despair, more strong than hope, lifts his

Though well she knows what face his Close thine eyes, Tristram, lest joy blind

From out that passionate past which is White, dazzling white, not hers,

"Sweet wife, is there no sail upon the sea?"