characteristic Arnold choice: they qualify by their ‘high seriousness’ while Shakespeare out-tops knowledge and thus soars into that region to which even the Arnoldian heaven of heavens is but a veil. I am certain Arnold never read Shakespeare adequately. I a m equally sure his uneasiness with Chaucer was the critic’s rather than the poet’s limitation. Chaucer is much more intricately in the mesh of human conditions as they have to be lived with and judged than either Milton o r Wordsworth. (Both these are insular Rockalls- magnificent eccentrics). He is wider, subtler, rangier: he has the Knight’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, the Clerkes Tale, the Pardoner’s Tale: the portraiture of Alisoun and the spirituality represented by Hugh’s hymn and Griselde’s patience. He has behind him his civilisation, and his own profound appreciation of its terms. This is his claim t o seriousness: a seriousness which makes Victorian angsf and angularity look quaintly limited still because of its aspirations to ‘height’. Chaucer is the poet of vertu, of nature, or corage. Chaucer is the nearest to Shakespeare our Enghsh great tradition has to offer.

CAF6 DE LA MUSIQUE

It seem a cold blue star, the lamp in the square. Hundreds of asteroid moths aimlessly circuit there. Tired, I glance at her rings, the things in her lap, As she chatters and fidgets and hunts all the time for a scrap (Marionette) of paper to show me. As I think, there is the lamp, with its halo of moths, and Here I am, watching what dithers like splinters of glass, And the midget conductor is dithering away at his band.

Yes, yes, I will look. But what do I see? The moth Surface of faint down on her arm; the cloth (Patiently pressed) of her dress; I notice the blue On her ankle where it has rubbed on the side of her shoe With the cobbler’s obscure economical iron in the heel. A moth lands on the table between us. No blaze Of gold, but its real, leafy green. And the real Woman unfolds before my discredited gaze.

‘Look alive!’ 1 say to myself; I watch her breath As it ebbs and flows, and suddenly I see: death Has only this for alternative-tentative tide Like a dilating plant that opens wide At last as a kind of light from its calyx of green (Hark at that man, languishing his ’cello to sing!) Not great blue star, fumbling moth. We have been Dead photographic eye, and living thing.

JOHN HOLLOWAY. 32