ground of actuality and
citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no
less than their vision. When Mr. Drinkwater looks out of his 'town
window' he dreams of the crocus flaming gold in far-off Warwick woods;
but he does not repudiate the drab inglorious street nor the tramway
ringing and moaning over the cobbles, and they come into his verse. And
I find it significant of the whole temper of the new poetry to ordinary
life no less than that of ordinary men and women to the new poetry,
that he has won a singularly intimate relationship with a great
industrial community. He has not fared like his carver in stone. But
then the eagles of his carving, though capable of rising, like
Shelley's, to the sun, are the Cromwells and Lincolns who themselves
brought the eagle's valour and undimmed eye into the stress and turmoil
of affairs.

No doubt a fiercer note of revolt may be heard at times in the poetry of
contemporary France, and that precisely where devotion to some parts of
the heritage of the past is most impassioned. The iconoclastic scorn of
youth's idealism for the effeteness of the 'old hunkers', as Whitman
called them, has rarely rung out more sharply than in the closing
stanzas of Claudel's great Palm Sunday ode. All the pomp and splendour
of bishops and cardinals is idle while victory yet is in suspense: that
must be won by youth in arms.

'To-morrow the candles and the dais and the bishop with his clergy
coped and gold embossed,
But to-day the shout like thunder of an equal, unofficered host
Who, led and kindled by the flag alone,
With one sole spirit swollen, and on one sole thought intent,
Are become one cry like the crash of walls shattered and gates rent:
'Hosanna unto David's son!'

Needless the haughty steeds marble-sculptured, or triumphal arches, or
chariots and four,
Needless the flags and the caparisons, the moving pyramids and towers,
and cars that thunder and roar,--
'Tis but an ass whereon sits Christ;
For to make an end of the nightmare built by the pedants and the
pharisees,
To get home to reality across the gulf of mendacities,
The first she-ass he saw sufficed!

Eternal youth is master, the hideous gang of old men is done with, we
Stand here like children, fanned by the breath of the things to be,
But victory we will have t