Poor, bleating beast! We two are much alike, At either end of life, though scarce an hour You've been in this rough world, and I so long That death already has me by the heels; For neither of us can stir to help himself, But both must bleat for others' aid. This world Is rough and bitter to the newly born, But far more bitter to the nearly dead. In _Daily Bread_ (1908-09), there are eighteen brief plays, written not in orthodox blank verse, like _Stonefolds_, but in irregular, brittle, breathless metres. Here is where art takes the short cut to life, sacrificing every grace to gain reality; the typical goal and method of twentieth-century poetry. So long as a vivid impression of character and circumstance is produced, the writer apparently cares nothing about style. I say "apparently," because the styleless style is perhaps the one best adapted to produce the sought-for effect. There is ever one difference between life and "art"--between drama and theatre--that Mr. Gibson has, I suppose, tried to cancel in these poems of daily bread. In art, the bigger the drama, the bigger the stage; one could not mount _Götterdämmerung_ in a village schoolhouse. But Life does not fit the splendour of the setting to the grandeur of the struggle. In bleak farm cottages, in dull dwellings in city blocks, in slum tenements, the greatest of life's tragedies and comedies are enacted--love, hate, avarice, jealousy, revenge, birth, death--the most terrific passions known to human nature are fully presented, without the slightest care for appropriate scenery from the Master of the show. Thus our poet leads us by the hand into sea-girt huts, into hovels at the mouths of mines, into garrets of noisy cities, and makes us silent witnesses of elemental woe. Here Labour, man's greatest blessing, takes on the aspect of the primal curse, since so many tragedies spring from the simple root of poverty. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the lack of it is the cause of much pain.