



Produced by Al Haines










POEMS

FIRST SERIES

BY J. C. SQUIRE




LONDON

MARTIN SECKER

XVII BUCKINGHAM STREET

ADELPHI




LONDON: MARTIN SECKER (LTD) 1918




  _DEDICATION_

  _Lord, I have seen at harvest festival
  In a white lamp-lit fishing-village church,
  How the poor folk, lacking fine decorations,
  Offer the first-fruits of their various toils:
  Not only fruit and blossom of the fields,
  Ripe corn and poppies, scabious, marguerites,
  Melons and marrows, carrots and potatoes,
  And pale round turnips and sweet cottage flowers,
  But gifts of other produce, heaped brown nets,
  Fine pollack, silver fish with umber backs,
  And handsome green-dark-blue-striped mackerel,
  And uglier, hornier creatures from the sea,
  Lobsters, long-clawed and eyed, and smooth flat crabs,
  Ranged with the flowers upon the window-niches,
  To lie in that symbolic contiguity
  While lusty hymns of gratitude ascend._

  _So I
  Here offer all I have found:
  A few bright stainless flowers
  And richer, earthlier blooms, and homely grain,
  And roots that grew distorted in the dark,
  And shapes of livid hue and sprawling form
  Dragged from the deepest maters I have searched.
  Most diverse gifts, yet all alike in this:
  They are all the natural products of my mind
  And heart and senses;
  And all with labour grown, or plucked, or caught._




PREFACE

The title of this book was chosen for this reason.  Had the volume been
called ---- _and Other Poems_ it might have given a false impression
that its contents were entirely new.  Had it been called _Collected
Poems_ the equally false impression might have been given that there
was something of finality about it.  The title selected seemed best to
convey both the fact that it was a collection and that, under
Providence, other (and, let us hope, superior)