The thin soap slips

And slithers like a shark under the ships.
My toes are on the soap-dish-that's the effect
Of my huge storms; an iron steamer's wrecked.
The soap slides round and round;

He's biting the old sailors, I expect. . . .
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?

Louis Golding

Louis Golding was born in Manchester in November, 1895 and received his early education at Manchester Grammar School. War found him in 1914 and took him to Macedonia and France, where he did considerable social and educational work in several armies.

On his return to England in 1919, he published his first volume of poems, Sorrow of War, and in the same year resumed his career at Oxford. The succeeding collection, Shepherd Singing Ragtime (1921) and his remarkable novel Forward From Babylon (1921), appeared while he was still an undergraduate.

Golding is richly gifted; he is a realist with a romantic, almost a rhapsodic, vision. Anger, pity, irony, find a ringing if not altogether controlled voice in his prose no less than in his rhymes.

PLOUGHMAN AT THE PLOUGH

He, behind the straight plough, stands
Stalwart; firm shafts in firm hands.

Naught he cares for wars and naught
For the fierce disease of thought.

Only for the winds, the sheer
Naked impulse of the year,

Only for the soil which stares
Clean into God's face, he cares.

In the stark might of his deed
There is more than art or creed;

In his wrist more strength is hid
Than the monstrous Pyramid;

Stauncher than stern Everest
Be the muscles of his breast;

Not the Atlantic sweeps a flood
Potent as the ploughman's blood.

He, his horse, his ploughshare, these Are the only verities.

Dawn to dusk, with God he stands, The Earth poised on his broad hands.

THE SINGER OF HIGH STATE

On hills too harsh for firs to climb,
Where eagle dare not hatch her brood,
On the sheer peak of Solitude,
With anvils of black granite crude
He beats austerities of rhyme.

Such godlike stuff his spirit drinks,
He made great odes of tempest there.
The steel-winged eagle, if he dare
To cleave these tracts of frozen air,
Hearing such music, swoops and sinks.

Stark tumults, which no tense night awes,
Of godly love and titan hate
Down crags of song reverberate.
Held by the Singer of High State,
Battalions of the midnight pause.

On hills uplift from Space and Time,
On the sheer peak of Solitude,

With stars to give his furnace food,
On anvils of black granite crude

He beats austerities of rhyme.

SUGGESTIONS FOR MORE INTELLIGENT

ENJOYMENT OF MODERN POETRY

Mr. Untermeyer, in a letter to his publishers, said: "We want this collection to look as little like the proverbial textbook as possible. We want a collection of poetry that boys and girls will enjoy, not one to throw at their heads as something they have to study."

These suggestions for study are offered solely with the hope that they will help some young readers, at least, toward increased enjoyment. The task is comparatively easy, because the organic quality of all poetry-rhythm or cadence is equally an organic part of every human being. Poetry exists because there is in man the same sense of rhythm which dominates all life. We breathe rhythmically, the tides ebb and flow, grasses sway in the breeze, the beat of the music makes the crowd keep time. Little children respond first to motion, and to thought expressed rhythmically; the rocker, the lullaby, the ditty, Mother Goose, get response from every child. The love of rhythm and a sensitiveness to the appeal of poetry is obviously inherent in varying degrees in every one. Samuel Johnson says the poet is one who has the faculty of joining music with reason, and of acting at once upon the senses and the passions.

Children lose their love for poetry frequently because their growth in power to understand the necessarily condensed expression of poetry does not keep pace with the difficulty of the poetry given them to read. Often, too, the remoter classics reflect a background of life which none

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