sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also..."'

The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in
these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can
mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction
to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the
dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.

'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.'

That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange
Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its
technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic
assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem
by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in
his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional
significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By
including it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a great
service to English letters.

Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read
_Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's
poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's
'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the
twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will
not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you
will find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that
which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. You
will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of
which makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible,
restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetry
is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and
that its significance finally depends upon the quality and
compre