REBEL VERSES

NEW YORK AGENTS LONGMANS, GREEN & Co. FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET

REBEL VERSES

BY

BERNARD GILBERT

OXFORD B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET MCMXVIII

By the Same Author

VERSE: Lincolnshire Lays; Farming Lays; Gone To the War; War Workers.

DRAMA: Eldorado; Their Father's Will; The Ruskington Poacher.

FICTION: What shall it Profit? Tattershall Castle; The Yellow Flag.

POLITICAL: Farmers and Tariff Reform: What Every Farmer Wants: The Farm Labourer's Fix.

MISCELLANEOUS: Living Lincoln; Fortunes for Farmers.

From The New Witness

Mr. Bernard Gilbert is one of the discoveries of the War. For years, it seems, he has been writing poetry, but it is only recently that an inapprehensive country has awakened to the fact. Now he is taking his rightful place among our foremost singers. What William Barnes was to Dorset, what T. E. Brown was to the Manx people—this is Mr. Gilbert to the folk of his native county of Lincoln. He has interpreted their lives, their sorrows, their aspirations, with a surprising fidelity. Mr. Gilbert never loses his grip upon realities. One feels that he knows the men of whom he writes in their most intimate moods; knows, too, their defects, which he does not shrink from recording. There is little of the dreamy idealism of the South in the peasant people of Lincolnshire. The outwardly respectable chapel-goer who asks himself, in a moment of introspection But why not have a good time here? Why should the Devil have all the beer? is true to type. But he has, too, his softer moods. Fidelity in friendship, courage, resource and perseverance—these are typical of the men of the Fens.

TO MORLEY ROBERTS

Acknowledgments to the Editors of the: English Review New Age Colour Westminster Gazette New Witness To-Day Clarion Australian Triad Bystander Musical Student and Nash's Magazine in whose columns these verses have appeared during 1917.

[vii]

Contents

[1]

To an old Friend

[59]

The Fool

PRINTED AT THE HOLYWELL PRESS OXFORD