Following Mr. Gibson's development as a poet, year by year, we come to _Thoroughfares_ (1908-14). These are short poems more conventional in form than their predecessors, but just as stark and grim as chronicles of life. Every one remembers the torture inflicted on women in the good-old-times, when they were strapped to posts on the flats at low tide, and allowed to watch the cruel slowness of approaching death. The same theme, with an even more terrible termination, is selected by Mr. Gibson in _Solway Ford_, where the carter is pinned by the heavy, overturned wagon on the sands; while the tide gradually brings the water toward his helpless body. He dies a thousand deaths in imagination, but is rescued just as the waves are lapping the wheels. Now he lies in bed, an incurable idiot, smiling as he sees gold and sapphire fishes swimming in the water over his head.... That rarest of all English metres--which Browning chose for _One Word More_--is employed by Mr. Gibson in a compound of tragedy-irony called _The Vindictive Staircase_. Unfortunately the rhythm is so closely associated with Browning's love-poem, that these lines sound like a parody: Mrs. Murphy, timidest of spectres, You who were the cheeriest of charers, With the heart of innocence and only Torn between a zest for priest and porter, Mrs. Murphy of the ample bosom,-- Suckler of a score or so of children. It seems best to leave this measure in the undisturbed possession of the poet who used it supremely well. Yet some of the verses in _Thoroughfares_ are an advance on Mr. Gibson's previous work. No reader will ever forget _Wheels_. Passing over _Borderlands_ (1912-14) which, with the exception of _Akra_, is the least successful of Mr. Gibson's works, we come to his most original contribution to modern poetry, the short poems included under the heading _Battle_ (1914-15). These verses afford one more bit of evidence that in order to write unconventional thoughts, it is not necessary to use unconventional forms. The ideas expressed here can be found in no other war-poet; they are idiosyncratic to the highest degree; yet the verse-forms in which they are written are stanzaic, as traditional as the most conservative critic could desire. There is, of course, no reason why any poet should not compose in new and strange rhythms if he prefers to do so; but I have never believed that originality in thought _necessarily_ demands metrical measures other than those found in the history of English literature.