“ Birds, that cry so loud in the old, green bowery garden,
Your song is of Love! Love! Love!
Will ye weary not nor cease?
For the loveless soul grows sick, the heart that the grey days harden;
I know too well that ye love! I would ye should hold your peace.
I too have seen Love rise, like a star; I have marked his setting;
I dreamed in my folly and pride that Life without Love were peace.
But if Love should await me yet, in the land of sleep and forgetting—
Ah, bird, could you sing me this, I would not your song should cease! ”

“ That praise the world to the sons of the world.
The idle humble hill and wood
Are bowed about the sacred Birth
And for one little while the earth
Is lazy with the love of good
But ready are you and ready am I
If the battle blow and the guns go by
For we are for all men under the sun
And they are against us every one
For the men that hate herd altogether
To pride and gold and the great white feather
And the thing is graven in star and stone
That the men that love are all alone. ”

“ Last as first the question rings
Of the Will's long travailings;
Why the All-mover,
Why the All-prover
Ever urges on and measures out the droning tune of Things.
Heaving dumbly
As we deem,
As in dream,
Apprehending not how fare the sentient subjects of Its scheme.
Nay;—shall not Its blindness break?
Yea, must not Its heart awake,
Promptly tending
To Its mending
In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness' sake? ”

“ I should rid myself of this Changeling yet.
I carried my woe to the Wise Man yonder,
"You sell forgetfulness, they say.
How much to pay
To forget a son who is my sorrow?"
The Wise Man began to ponder.
"Charms have I, many a one,
To make a woman forget her lover,
A man his wife or a fortune fled,
To make the day forget the morrow,
The doer forget the deed he has done,
But a mighty spell must I borrow
To make a woman forget her son,
For this I will take a royal fee. ”

“ Sup o' the cream-pan! Devon to me!
Where my fathers sleep, turning to dust,
This old body throw when die I must!
There my Mother calls, wakeful is she!
Sound o' the West-wind! Devon to me!
Where my fathers lie, when I am gone,
Who need pity me, dead? Never one!
There my Mother clasps me. Let me be!
Feel o' the red earth! Devon to me!
EVA GORE-BOOTH
MAEVE OF THE BATTLES ”

“ WHEN I SHALL RISE
When I shall rise, and full of many fears,
Set forth upon my last long journey lone,
And leave behind the circling earth to go
Amongst the countless stars to seek God's throne.
When in the vapourish blue, I wander, lost,
Let some fair paradise reward my eyes—
Hill after hill, and green and sunny vale,
As I have known beneath the Irish skies. ”

“ The lure of the silver to gold, of the pale unto colour,
Of the seen to the real unseen;
Of voices away to the voiceless, of sound unto silence,
Of words to a wordless calm;
Of music doomed unto wandering, still returning,
Ever to heaven and home.
The lure of the beautiful woman through flesh unto spirit,
Through a smile unto endless light ”

“ But dead in his harness the Green Knight lay.
STEPHEN PHILLIPS
LURES IMMORTAL
Sadly, apparently frustrate, life hangs above us,
Cruel, dark unexplained;
Yet still the immortal through mortal incessantly pierces
With calls, with appeals, and with lures.
Lure of the sinking sun, into undreamed islands,
Fortunate, far in the West;
Lure of the star, with speechless news o'er brimming,
With language of darted light ”

“ For the grief will be everywhere as great
And he'll everywhere spread the smirch of sin—
So long as a taste of our blood he may win,
So long as he may become a mortal.
I beseech you,
Prince and poor man, to watch the gate.
The heart is poisoned where he has fed,
The house is ruined that lets him in.
Yet I know I shall never teach you.
With the voice of the dear and the eyes of the dead
He will come to the door, and you'll let him in. ”

“ Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid:
The wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side.
Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
MAKING HASTE
"Soon!" ”

“ And cast their little nets into an unknown world.
The countless, darting splendours that they miss,
The rare and vital magic of the main,
The which for all their care
They never shall ensnare—
All this
Perchance in dreams they know ”

“ Yet hiding in its mesh the one desired gift;
That living food
Which man for ever seeks to snatch from out the flood.
MRS MARGARET L. WOODS
SONGS
I've heard, I've heard
The long low note of a bird,
The nightingale fluting her heart's one word.
I know, I know
Pink carnations heaped with snow.
Summer and winter alike they blow.
I've lain, I've lain
Under roses' delicate rain,
That fall and whisper and fall again.
Come woe, come white
Shroud o' the world, black night!
I have had love and the sun's light.
THE CHANGELING
When did the Changeling enter in? ”

“ Wide, as a world to embrace;
And last, and grandest, the lure, the invitation,
And sacred wooing of death;
Unto what regions, or heavens, or solemn spaces,
Who, but by dying, can tell?
BEAUTIFUL LIE THE DEAD
Beautiful lie the dead ”

“ They starve, and overhead
The countless feet pace London Town
Of men who hold them dead,
Like Samson, blind and scorned,
In pain their time they bide
To seize the roots of London Town
And tumble down its pride. ”

“ These excellent words of Sir Philip Sidney give the reason and scope of this collection of examples of the poetry of the present century. No attempt at arbitrary classification or labelling has been made; it is not intended to show that any poet, deliberately or otherwise, is a Neo-Symbolist or Paroxyst or is afflicted with any other 'ist or 'ism; it is not compiled to assert that any one group of poets is superior to any other group of poets or to poets who had the misfortune to have their corporeal existence cut short before the dawn of the twentieth century ”

“ I have not failed to honour. And I say
It would be better for such men as we
And we be nearer Bethlehem, if we lay
Shot dead on snows scarlet for Liberty,
Dead in the daylight; upon Christmas Day. ”

“ The finest lyric work of our day needs no further introduction; the poet is his own best interpreter; but it may be added, in anticipation of adventitious criticism of the limitations of these examples, that the capacity of the present volume and the absence abroad of some potential contributors account for the non-inclusion of certain writers who otherwise would have been represented here. ”

“ It does not presuppose an abrupt period, but for the sake of convenience and in justification of its existence includes only the work of living writers produced during the present century and therefore most likely to be representative of the poetry of to-day. ”

“ He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blurre the margent with interpretations and loade the memorie with doubtfulnesse, but hee cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of musicke, and with a tale forsoothe he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play and olde men from the chimney-corner, and pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the minde from wickedness to vertue. ”

“ Lures Immortal80 Beautiful lie the Dead82 Lyric from "The Sin of David"83 EDEN PHILLPOTTS: Many novels: Dance of the Months; Sketches of Dartmoor and Poems (Gowans & Gray) , 1911; The Iscariot, a Poem (Murray) , 1912; Up-Along and Down-Along (Methuen) , 1905; Wild Fruit (John Lane) , 1911. A Devon Courting84 A Litany to Pan85 Swinburne87 DORA SIGERSON SHORTER: Verses, 1894; The Fairy Changeling, and other Poems, 1897 ”

“ Also the day I give you ease
Of golden guineas you pay a hundred."
Laughing I left the Wise Man's door.
Has he found such things where a Changeling sits?
The home is darkened from roof to floor,
The house is naked and ravaged and plundered
Where a Changling sits
On the hearthstone, warming his shivering fits.
He sits at his ease, for he knows well
He can keep his post. ”

“ When We Dreamers Wake, a Drama for To-day (Nutt) , 1909; A Son of Cain and other Poems (Longmans) , 1910; In the Wake of the Phœnix (Longmans) , 1911; On the Face of a Star (Longmans) , 1913. To a Blackbird on New Year's Day66 La Danseuse68 God Returns70 ALICE MEYNELL: Poems (Collected Edition) , 1913. Essays (selected from The Rhythm of Life, etc.) (Burns & Oates) , 1914. To the Body72 Christ in the Universe73 Maternity74 WILL H. OGILVIE: The Overlander; The Land we Love ”

“ II, Justice; The Little Dream; The Eldest Son, 1912. Vol. III, The Fugitive; The Pigeon; The Mob, 1914. The Downs27 The Prayer27 Devon to Me28 EVA GORE-BOOTH: Poems (Longmans, Green & Co.) , 1898; Unseen Kings (Longmans) , 1904; The One and the Many (Longmans) , 1904; The Three Resurrections and the Triumph of Maeve (Longmans) , 1905; The Sorrowful Princess (Longmans) , 1907; The Egyptian Pillar (Maunsel & Co., Dublin) , 1907; The Agate Lamp (Longmans) , 1912. Maeve of the Battles29 Re-Incarnation31 Leonardo Da Vinci34 JOHN GURDON: Erinna, a Tragedy (Edward Arnold) , 1913 ”