There is considerable diversity in Mr. Fletcher’s _Irradiations_, but one soon discovers that he has not encrimsoned himself with the standard passions of poetry. He does not display the usual contortions of love, hate, grief, and fear. Some persons have, therefore, found him aloof, oversubtle, and lacking in emotional force. This intimation that Mr. Fletcher’s art is etiolated is an admission of the reader’s incompleteness. Vitality does not depend on subject; nor is subtlety necessarily weakness. But the notion strangely persists that a poet must clothe his emotions in samite and dance with them around a blood-red fire to the plangent accompaniment of drums and trumpets. To say that Mr. Fletcher has entwined himself with nature would unfairly give an impression of Wordsworthian insipidity. Yet Mr. Fletcher in many of his poems is a part of the rain, of the sand and wind, of the clouds and sky. But he is never merely descriptive. He has the power of conveying a mood in the terms of nature without intruding himself upon the reader. Let me illustrate with one of the best of his poems which has been much quoted elsewhere: Flickering of incessant rain On flashing pavements; Sudden scurry of umbrellas; Bending recurved blossoms of the storm. The winds came clanging and clattering From long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits; They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom, And the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves. Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain Dripping from the eaves. Our tread-mill versifiers will shrink and mumble in the presence of Mr. Fletcher’s clean new poetry. They who have inherited the dead mottled skin of old poetic form with its incrustation of ancient allusions, symbols, and yellowed figures, will not feel the alluring freshness of a poem such as this: It is evening, and the earth Wraps her shoulders in an old blue shawl. Afar there clink the polychrome points of the stars, Indefatigable after all these years! Here upon earth there is life, and then death, Dawn, and later nightfall, Fire, and the quenching of embers: But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part of the world, If the idea fits my fancy? Dawns of marvellous light, wakeful, sleepy, weary, dancing dawns; You are rose petals settling through the blue of my evening; I light my pipe to salute you, And sit puffing smoke in the air and never say a word. In his preface Mr. Fletcher says the use of rhyme is in its essence barbarous; yet he himself uses it not infrequently together with such devices as assonance, onomatopoeia, and alliteration. He is not inconsistent, however, for he admits that rhyme used intelligently will add to the richness of effect. It does: