him is again and again to be reminded of
Donne. Like Donne, he is largely self-occupied, examining the horrors of
his own soul, overburdened at times with thought, an intellect at odds
with the spirit. Like Donne, he will have none of the merely poetic,
either in music or in imagery. He beats out a music of his own and he
beats out an imagery of his own. In his early work, this sometimes
resulted in his poems being unable to rise far from the ground. They
seemed to be labouring on unaccustomed wings towards the ether. What
other living poet has ever given a poem such a title as _Antinomies on
a Railway Station?_ What other has examined himself with the same X-rays
sort of realism as Mr. Squire has done in _The Mind of Man?_ The
latter, like many of Mr. Squire's poems, is an expression of fastidious
disgust with life. The early Mr. Squire was a master of disgust, and we
see the same mood dominant even in the _Ode: In a Restaurant_, where the
poet suddenly breaks out:--

Soul! This life is very strange,
And circumstances very foul
Attend the belly's stormy howl.

The ode, however, is not merely, or even primarily, an expression of
disgust. Here, too, we see Mr. Squire's passion for romance and energy.
Here, too, we see him as a fisherman of strange imagery, as when he
describes the sounds of the restaurant band as they float in upon him
from another room and die again:--

Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass
Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass.

The _Ode: In a Restaurant_ is perhaps the summit of Mr. Squire's writing
as a poet at odds with himself, a poet who floats above the obscene and
dull realities of every day, "like a draggled seagull over dreary flats
of mud." He has already escaped into bluer levels in the poem, _On a
friend Recently Dead_, written in the same or the following year. Here
he ceases to be a poet floating and bumping against a ceiling. He is now
ranging the heaven of the emancipated poets. Even when he writes of the
common and prosaic things he now charges them with significance for the
emotions. He is no longer a satirist and philosopher, but a lover. How
well he conjures up the picture of the room in which his friend used to
sit and talk:--

Capricious friend!
Here in this room, not long before the end,
Here in this very room six months ago
You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so.
Beyond the window shook the ash-t