grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements
in his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms.
A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merely
that beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their going
they are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference.
And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!

Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasy
than by its collapse. It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound;
but it is the fruit of intensity, and bears the traits.
The search for solitude, the relief from crowds, the open door into nature;
the sense of flight and escape; the repeated thought of safety,
the insistent fatigue, the cry for sleep; -- all these bear confession
in their faces. "Flight", "Town and Country", "The Voice", are eloquent
of what they leave untold; and the climax of "Retrospect", --

"And I should sleep, and I should sleep," --

or the sestet of "Waikiki", or the whole fainting sonnet
entitled "A Memory", belong to the nadir of vitality. At moments
weariness set in like a spiritual tide. I associate, too, with such moods,
psychologically at least, his visions of the "arrested moment", as in
"Dining-Room Tea", -- a sort of trance state -- or in the pendant sonnet.
Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets. Rupert Brooke
seems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully
such moments. But even when the image of life, imaginative or real,
falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite
body of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish"!
For I cannot express too strongly my admiration of the literary sense
of this young poet, and my delight in it. "All these have been my loves,"