"Mildness Is No More"

SELECTED POEMS (63 pp.)--Elizabeth Daryush--Selected by Yvor Winters--Swallow-Morrow ($2.50).

Elizabeth Bridges Daryush was 42 when her father, Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, died in 1930. Except to a very small number of readers, her own poetry was then, and still is, almost unknown. But if her admirers are few, they are also fervent. Chief among them is the California poet, scholar and critic, Yvor Winters, who made this selection. In his opinion, Mrs. Daryush is "one of the few distinguished poets of our century and a poet who can take her place without apology in the company of Campion and Herrick."

This would be gay company, though Campion and Herrick might find her verses--subtle and passionate though they are--a little too thoroughly on the sad side for their taste.

in the warm wood now

between grief and grief

blithe is every bough

and every leaf;

though death's behind me,

death not far before,

undying beauty

is at my door.

If modern poetry has any common denominator, it is probably this sense of full but precarious moments--a conviction that beauties are transient, leaseholds short, attitudes fated, and all the foundations mined. Against this conviction Mrs. Daryush, like many another contemporary, balances faith in the precarious art of poetry. Her lyrics are those of a gentlewoman (she lives a retired Oxfordshire country life with her husband, a onetime official of the Persian foreign office), but, like her father's, her poems have responded to public occasions. This was written on the war in Ethiopia:

Mildness is no more, Tolerance is done

to death,

Pity is buried deep, even Pardon is

shut down

Among the shadows, starved of all but

ghostly breath;

You alone live, their slaughterer grim,

now lovely grown;

Now could I die for you, who in mad

dream I see

Reversed on your own fiends, O now

right enmity!

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