m the world of illusion to the world of real things--from Bagdad and
Babylon to England. His poetry does not as a rule touch the heart; but
in _Oak and Olive_ and _Brumana_ his spectatorial sensuousness at last
breaks down and the cry of the exile moves us as in an intimate letter
from a friend since dead. Those are not mere rhetorical reproaches to
the "traitor pines" which

sang what life has found
The falsest of fair tales;

which had murmured of--

older seas
That beat on vaster sands,

and of--

lands
Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.

It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the
war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a
poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. _The Burial in
England_ is perhaps too much of an _ad hoc_ call to be great poetry. But
it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different
world from his mediocre version of _God Save the King_.

At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion
is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is
to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as
_The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus_,
and _Bryan of Brittany_. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it
were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world
of the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftener
of amorousness than of love, as in _The Ballad of the Student of the
South._ His passion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East,
stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a
brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice
extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon
which Mr. Squire comments:

There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially
fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver
and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses
of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet
of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images
of Fire, of a ship, and of an old white-bearded man recur
frequently in his poems.

Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker is
anything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a