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the most orientally coloured of Mr. Davidson's prose poems attest their failure. An example:
"Thou failest not in remembrance of me. Thou keepest in mind my constant need. Thou givest thought to my alone-being. Thou dost not forsake me.
Thy goodness endureth in the end. Thy loving kindness floweth in an unceasing stream. There is no last to thy fair-bestowing.
O, thou makest me to exult. Thou makest me to give praises in song. Thou makest me to utter thy name in many languages, to sound it on many strings."
Miss Davies, like Miss Morgan, suffers from her own facility. Much of Youth Riding (a title that should delight the Freudian Mr. Mordell) is composed of a too-fluent wonder, an ever-ready wistfulness. This lyricist has almost caught the trick with which Sara Teasdale tightens up her songs—she manages artlessness and the catch-in-the-throat in poems like The Day before April, The Apple Tree Said—but where Miss Teasdale summons passion, Miss Davies commands little beyond pleasantness. A characteristic lyric:
"We cannot die, for loveliness
Is an eternal thing.
If God, his dim old eyes to bless,
Brings back the Spring,
Shall he not bring again your grace,
Your laughter, your warm hair?
And how can he destroy my face
Your kiss made fair?"
When Miss Davies turns from the precise little eight-line stanza form, she is much nearer success. In fact when she discards rhyme entirely she often achieves it. The most individual notes in her collection are in poems like Marriage, The Proposal, and her early Songs of a Girl. Glancing again at the rest of her volume with its preponderance of easily-traced patterns and obvious sweetness, there seems to be a strange significance in the fact that Miss Davies was once one of the rebellious Others.