Poets of the younger generation Author:William Archer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LAURENCE BINYON From somewhat commonplace beginnings, Mr. Laurence Binyon has ripened into a poet of great promise and no inconsiderable performance. His Newd... more »igate Poem of 1890, Persephone, was a Newdigate like any other. Save for a certain dignity of movement, it had nothing to distinguish it. His Lyric Poems of 1894 were gracefully contemplative and pleasantly Matthew-Arnoldish. There was still a good deal of feeble and commonplace work in them. He was still capable of writing: So, on the mountains, hapless Niobe Bewailed her children, by dread deities slain ; Those jealous deities whose bright shafts ne'er miss, Phoebus, and his stern sister, Artemis. He still thought it worth while not only to write—that is the common lot—but to publish such verses as these: Ask me not, dear, what thing it is That makes me love you so; What graces, what sweet qualities, That from your spirit flow ; For I have but this old reply, That you are you, that I am I. My heart leaps when you look on me, And thrills to hear your voice, Lies, then, in these the mystery That makes my soul rejoice ? 1 only know, I love you true ; Since I am I, and you are you. But in many individual passages and phrases he already shows imaginative vision and verbal felicity. The admira- tion with which one reads such lines as these: The gathering dusk, and one pure star Deep in the visionary west, is tempered by the reflection that this solitary star has shone in many a poet's skies, if not in "the visionary west," at least in some cognate quarter of the heavens. Still, a poet can show his sense of beauty in his borrowings no less than in his inventions. Even the beautiful phrase (from an unnamed poem on London at night): Sleep, to how many spent-out spirits, yi...« less