nfirmity of
becoming haunted and held him most.

'Often I had gone this way before,
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else.'

To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
was not instantly engulfed--

'In the undefined
Abyss of what can never be again.'

Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
New House.'

'All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
After these things should be.'

But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the
enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul
itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book
is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal,
shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create
the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the
unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of
this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other'
tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.

'And now I dare not follow after
Too close. I try to keep in sight,
Dreading his frown and worse his laughter,
I steal out of the wood to light;
I see the swift shoot from the rafter
By the window: ere I alight
I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.'

No; not a great po

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