Winchester, a handful of love poems and two on music. He catches the glamour and magic of the Orient in the best of his verse—in this, for instance, of 'High Barbary':
The distant mountains' jagged, cruel line
Cuts the imagination as a blade
Of dove-grey Damascene. In many a raid
Here Barbary pirates drave the ships of wine
Back to Sicilian harbours, harried kine,
Pillaged Calabrian villages and made
The land a desolation....
Saracens, Moors, Phœnicians—all the East,
Franks, Huns, Walloons, the pilgrims of the Pope,
All, all are gone. The clouds are trailing hence:
So goes to Benediction some proud priest
Sweeping the ground with embroidered golden cope.
—Go, gather up the fumes of frankincense.
Something, too, of the magic and glamour of his alien surroundings he distils into an unpublished poem that sighs with his unsatisfied longing for music:
I have not heard music for so long a time,
For twenty dusty months blown by, and each a year
Spent in a dusty prison-house it seems, no rhyme,
No tune to cut the hours upon the walls,
Only the taunt of fading bugle-calls
To rouse a memory from sleep and make it stir.
