2. WILLUM ACCOUNTS FOR THE PRICE OF LAMPREY 50 3. THE OLDEST INHABITANT HEARS FAR OFF THE DRUMS OF DEATH 51 4. SETH BEMOANS THE OLDEST INHABITANT 52 5. A RIVER, A PIG, AND BRAINS 53 6. MARTHA BAZIN ON MARRIAGE 54 CHILDREN: 1. LITTLE ABEL GOES TO CHURCH 55 2. DELIGHTS 56 3. THE BOY WITH LITTLE BARE TOES 57 THE WIND IN TOWN TREES 58 FORM--A STUDY 59 VILLANELLE 60 KOSSOVO DAY 61 A PHILOSOPHY 62 CONSOLATOR AFFLICTORUM 63 RECOGNITION 64 ON OVER BRIDGE AT EVENING 65 PASSION 66 A COMMON PETITION 67 AN ADVENTURE WITH GOD 68 THE STRANGER 69 THE BUGLER 71 INTRODUCTION by Bishop Frodsham “Good wine needs no bush.” Those who know and love “A Gloucestershire Lad” would resent any lengthy attempt to praise the quality of Lieutenant Harvey’s verses. Some of the poems from a German prison camp may reach a far higher standard of lyric excellence than any in the earlier volume. The two ballades on war and “The Bugler” grip one by the throat. But all the verses have a sweetness and beauty entirely their own. The poems are all short--too short. Lieutenant Harvey sings like the wild birds of his own dear Gloucestershire because he cannot help doing so. He stops short--as they do--and like them begins again. What can we do but take what he gives us, wondering that he can write so well, mewed as he is in a cage--and such a cage! An agony of inarticulate longing shrills in a feathered cageling’s song: the man simply and unaffectedly lays bare his heart, his love, his faith, his hope, his sense of loneliness, of ineffectiveness, of baffled purposes and incompleted manhood. Memory is at once the joy and torment of all who are forced to think. Memory tears the heart-strings of those who are in captivity. It makes some hopeless and weak, others bitter and savage, according to their natures. Beneath all the music of this man’s words there is an undertone of fierce anger that sweeps him away at times, but is this not characteristic of many other young Englishmen who laugh so well, and “woo bright danger for a thrilling kiss”? His memories sweep along the great gamut of his own tremendous experiences, and yet they never lose the melodies of home. Perhaps because of the objects of his heart’s desire he is so kindly withal, so modest, so humorous, and, to use his own words of another, “so worldly foolish, so divinely wise.” Herein is the fascination of these verses.