Welsh Journals

occur readily enough in T. S. Eliot's philosophic meditations, but in her contexts sound unnatural. There is, moreover, a shortness of breath in the rhythm, made more noticeable by the modernistic devices of enjambement which Mr; Eliot sgain has made much use of, and in better contexts. When she requires a fuller rhythm, Mrs. Ridler draws even more deeply on Mr. Eliot's resources, as in For a Christening In June the early signs, And after, the steady labour of subcutaneous growth: Past the danger of dissolution in the third month, And in the fifth, quickens. But hidden while the leaves thicken, through the season when smooth corn Grows bearded, through the peeling of the summer's gold fleece; Hidden but with heart throbbing, while stars sharpen and throb in the skies, While sunsets grow cold and orange, while winter airs are whirled and torn; And at Candlemas with pain is born. This is to treat a childbirth as if it were a solemn entry into The Waste Land, with vistas of the land of The Golden Bough beyond. A personal event like this does not need such pompous trappings. But no doubt this is an earlier poem than the most of the book. Rhyme and Reason and Trident are pamphlets from the same publishers and sharing the same contributors. Rhyme and Reason-perhaps intended to turn into a periodical when the Paper Control permits-is a collection of thirty-four miscel- laneous poems to which David Martin contributes a brief manifesto by way of introduction. He writes Rhyme and Reason will speak for itself. Its message the lyricism, the romantic passion for which the poets of these islands were loved, has been reborn and blended with a revolutionary imagination and an inspired realism which is the counterpart in literature of the physical creation of the new, socialist, unshackled society. No reason without rhyme, no rhyme without reason This revolutionary rebirth, however, exists more in Mr. Martin's convicticns than in the poems he introduces. But when he writes that he is more concerned with the objective impact of their prosody," he has reason for concern, because the prosody is unremarkable and its impact also. The poems are a mixed bag, in intention and in accomplishment. Idris Davies invokes Wales in two hopeful little poems Randall Swingler proves at some length that his particular love is the starting-point of world-freedom; there is a sound but slight piece of Scottish portraiture by Adam Drinan; a good poem from Northern Ireland by Roy McFadden; some workaday verses by John Pudney, some flag-waving by such old hands at revolution as Hugh McDiarmid and Jack Lindsay, and three poems by John Manifold which betray a wide reading in the Audenesque rhetoric of the last decade. As the most perfect manifestation of the revolutionary lilt," Mr. Martin reprints Yeats's Easter, 1916, which consorts strangely with its surroundings, for on re-reading it appears the perfect lament of an old Tory-hearted Whig. Trident has poems by John Manifold, Hubert Nicholson, David Martin. The most readable is a school-book ballad by Mr. Nicholson about the Battle of Edgehill, written on the promise that the Parliamentary cause was a people's war." The most interesting is a gusty satire in the manner of The Dunciad by John Manifold. Stephen Spender comes in for some hard knocks Here simple Spender in a place apart Bares on his sleeve his haemophilic heart; Dribble by drip the pinkish flow proceeds- Oh, squeeze it, Mister Spender! Thar she bleeds Mr. Manifold is all for toughness, honesty and no nonsense about literary careerism this is good, and would be better if his colleagues were also his disciples. The sources from which in the main the techniques and reactions of these two pamphlets spring are assembled in W. G. Bebbington's anthology, Introducing Modern Poetry. It selects from Eliot, Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Alun Lewis and fifteen others, and its chief purpose is to present their more readily intelligible poems for the instruction of the upper forms of schools. This purpose doubtless