"'And never a man, you'll find there
To take your hand
And shake your hand;
But when you go behind there
You must make your hand a sword,
"'To fence with a foeman swarthy
And swink there
Nor shrink there,
Though cowardly and worthy
Must drink there one reward.'"
I have purposely so chosen as to make the contrast as glaring as possible; but the contrast is implicit, though not always so obvious, between Mr. Squire's early work and his later work. He used to be an elaborate, complicated, abstruse, and difficult poet; and in the process of years, without losing his power or subtlety, he has gained in simplicity and much increased his range. The later of these two pieces, individual in feeling and rhythm, is still a lyric almost in the Elizabethan tradition. The earlier piece is one which betrays in form and language the author’s too great consciousness of his own singularity of feeling.
I do not suggest that Mr. Squire, however his development proceeds, will ever fall into the ordinary tradition of English poetry. He is by nature, I think, mostly a rather aloof, difficult, and austere poet. But this fact has ceased to make him angular, awkward, and gymnastic in expression. The piece which I consider to be his best, The Stronghold, moves in a sufficiently rarefied atmosphere of thought:
"Quieter than any twilight
Shed over earth's last deserts,
Quiet and vast and shadowless
Is that unfounded keep,
Higher than the roof of the night's high chamber,
Deep as the shaft of sleep.
"And solitude will not cry there,
Melancholy will not brood there,
Hatred, with its sharp corroding pain,
And fear will not come there at all:
