Thro' the cotton bushes low
Merry boys with shouldered crooks
Close them in a single row,
Shout among them as they go
With one bell-ring o'er the brooks.
Such delight you never know
Reading it from gilded books. . . .
The fourth line is quite as inadequate as some of Sorley's most careless, but the poem is exquisite; only in the book the picture and mood are weakened by an additional stanza.
His movements are more sustainedly happy in less original work, which is an indication that he had it in him to surpass what now remains his best.
"I often look when the moon is low
Thro' that other window on the wall,
At a land all beautiful under snow,
Blotted with shadows that come and go
When the winds rise up and fall.
And the form of a beautiful maid
In the white silence stands
And beckons me with her hands. . . ."
The trouble produced by a soldier's life in such a mind accounts for the comparative poverty of the second book, rather than any failure of impulse or resource. Neither book is so much a collection of poems as a store-house of lines, phrases and images, with here a cadence caught and lost, there a striking thought—choice things, but rarely mounted to advantage, rather, to use his own words, like
". . . an apron full of jewels The dewy cobweb swings."
Here are others: and you might have as many again, were there space to quote them:
"The large moon rose up queenly as a flower
Charmed by some Indian pipes."
