, was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes himself as "author,
publisher, editor and book-seller." Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop
in London in 1912, a unique establishment having as its object a
practical relation between poetry and the public, and keeping in stock
nothing but poetry, the drama, and books connected with these
subjects. His quarterly _Poetry and Drama_ (discontinued during the
war and revived in 1919 as _The Monthly Chapbook_), was in a sense the
organ of the younger men; and his shop, in which he has lived for the
last seven years except while he was in the army, became a genuine
literary center.

Of Monro's books, the two most important are _Strange Meetings_ (1917)
and _Children of Love_ (1919). "The Nightingale Near the House," one
of the loveliest of his poems, is also one of his latest and has not
yet appeared in any of his volumes.

THE NIGHTINGALE NEAR THE HOUSE

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:
It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond
Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond
Stares. And you sing, you sing.

That star-enchanted song falls through the air
From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,
Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;
And all the night you sing.

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee
As all night long I listen, and my brain
Receives your song; then loses it again
In moonlight on the lawn.

Now is your voice a marble high and white,
Then like a mist on fields of paradise,
Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,
Then breaks, and it is dawn.

EVERY THING

Since man has been articulate,
Mechanical, improvidently wise,
(Servant of Fate),
He has not understood the little cries
And foreign conversations of the small
Delightful creatures that have followed him
Not far behind;
Has failed to hear the sympathetic call
Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind
Reposeful Teraphim
Of his domestic happiness; the Stool
He sat on, or the Door he entered through:
He has not thanked them, overbearing fool!
What is he coming to?

But you should listen to the talk of these.
Honest they are, and patient they have kept;
Served him without his Thank you or his Please ...
I often heard
The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word,
Murmuring, before I slept.
The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud,