THE MONTH

New York, New York, U.S.A.

December 1920

(page 568)

REVIEWS.

SOME NEW VERSE.

Lillygay: An Anthology of Anonymous Poems. [By Victor B. Neuburg] Steyning: The Vine Press. Pp. 78. Price, 5s. net.

Lillygay, which the Vine Press entitle “An Anthology of Anonymous Poems,” contains a dozen of Neo-Jacobean ballads of pleasing metre, but primitive moral. These are illustrated with equally primitive woodcuts. The reader is depressed by the apparent necessity for a Scotch ballad to centre round ladies of high degree but low tastes. One of the ballads that is a little more original in subject, namely: “Sick Dick; or, The Drunkard’s Tragedy,” might surely have been given to the schoolboy, who would delight in it, and not printed in excellent type on antique laid paper. One had no illusions about the finesse of modern taste, but one did not realize that we were so Neolithic. However, there is one poem whose anonymity we mourn, and that is the exquisite “Lyke-Wake Dirge,” which, once having read, one must have by heart. For the rest, one hopes that the Vine Press will give their readers something less boisterously depressing in their next anthology.