On sways the tilting train: We feel the carriage bluffly sideways blown, We see the chill shower brighten on the pane, We hear the high wind through the lantern moan, We three borne ever through the wind and rain, We three who meet here not to meet again, We three poor faring fools who sit alone. But toward the end there is a romantic lapse to excuse the liberties taken: But the giant Train begins a confident song “Why be so meek, so proud, when both are wrong.” Sacheverell Sitwell can write even more casually of the train. For romantic lapses like the following in _At Breakfast_: A railway engine ran across the field Galloping like a swift horse down the rails. As it came quicker the window-panes rattled, The roof shook side to side: all its beams trembled, Thundering hoofs were upon us--glass chariots. are not even real lapses like Mr. Nichols’ but a half-satiric “Look: modernist though I am, I can still be romantic about old-fashioned romantic subjects like the railway train.” It is now not a ‘monster’ but a charming early-Victorian _objet de vertu_ under a glass dome. We find Miss Marianne Moore describing expanding bookcases and books printed on india-paper in a serious poem, without self-consciousness: the vast indestructible necropolis of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units; the steel, the oak, the glass, the Poor Richard publications containing the public secrets of efficiency on “paper so thin that one thousand four hundred and twenty pages make one inch.” Without self-consciousness? Perhaps that is too much to say when so short a space of years separate poetry of this sort from the once-advanced poetry of, say, Richard Le Gallienne, a ‘decadent’ of the ’nineties still alive and at present living in the same city as Miss Moore, like her a literary critic; a city where there must be large backward sections of the reading public to whom Mr. Le Gallienne is still an advanced writer because he has, perhaps, written familiarly of the Devil and the sweets of sin. But is it necessary for the poet to come to the point, after a long history of gradually acclimatizing his verse to what were once considered unpoetical subjects, where he can, with Miss Moore, bring himself to insert fourteen unrevised and consecutive words straight from a newspaper advertisement into his poem, and put them into quotation marks as well? Though a feat of poetic self-martyrdom, doubtless, and perhaps the logical conclusion of giving civilization what it wants--verse actually interpretative of what is called ‘the poetry of modern business’--it is bad for both poetry and business: the quotation would have been much more effective left in the original setting to compose the daily synthetic advertisement-poem of the morning newspaper.