Abstract
MR. TOLLY is clearly a scholar who has been thrown, like so many others, into the brutalities of war, and who heartens himself by writing verses that recall the happier years. But, though he has studied the ancient classics, and also zoology, his manner is not that of a poet, or even of a teacher, seeking in the concise forms of verse the expression of cumulative research. Why, for example, and for what mechanical reason, did the dead Adonis sail “to sea, on springs”? Does the sun “shine” a beam? And will the general reader, who has still so much to learn about ancestral forms of life, really gather anything from the condensed text-book terminology of pp. 49–60? We might, indeed, be pleasantly surprised to “hear the tune” that the Permian reptiles “sang at sundown … pregnant with speech and nightingales”; but we cannot believe that, by any process of selection, “Death … endowed with brains the victors” in the struggle for existence. The crowded stanzas on the development of religions are not more satisfactory. It is unfair to suggest what Swinburne or Flecker might have made of them; but, even between Olympos and Salonika, Mr. Tolly has caught only the spray of the high and rising wave of war-time inspiration.
Horizons: At Dawn and at Dusk.
Poems by Colki Tolly. Pp. ix + 82. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918.) Price 3s. 6d. net.
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C., G. Horizons: At Dawn and at Dusk . Nature 101, 484 (1918). https://doi.org/10.1038/101484a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/101484a0