Excerpt from Merrie Carlisle and Poems of Tradition

Tyrtaeus? The devotion of our poets in time past to classical themes - as if these alone embodied the ideal and universal - has rendered poetry caviare to the general. A change of poetic symbols from the unknown to the familiar might mean much for the interest of the democracy in poetry. At any rate there is no reason why poetry should not appeal to the million as well as to the cultured few. If they but read aright the signs of our time, our younger poets should soon come into their kingdom. Let them don their singing robes for the people, not for a small exclusive coterie. Is it not foolish of Church and State to ignore the measureless potencies of social service wrapped up in popular song? Is not one half of the Old Testament poetry? And in the light of this fact, is it not surprising that our British Church history, with its stirring episodes, and above all the romance of the last century of Missions, has not been sung into the popular heart, but still remains, poetically speaking, virgin soil?

To the pieces on local tradition the writer adds some others indicating more definitely his attitude to life, and suggesting, however brokenly, some aspects of that supreme interpreter of experience our greatest tradition and heritage - the Christian evangel of the most blessed God. The helmeted prologue, then, may perhaps vindicate this book as the plea of a provincial voice that poets, as of old, sing and recite their verse to the people, not to a clique, and that due recognition of the exceeding value of tradition - local, national, Christian - be made by a democratic age, which looks with infectious eagerness to the future, and has set its hand in earnest to the titanic task of social reconstruction.

In the first section of this volume some of the pieces were originally composed in the Scots dialect, but these have been modified to save the reader from the distraction of footnotes explaining the vernacular. In the second section the texts were an afterthought. The pieces were written on some spontaneous impulse and then found susceptible of Scripture texts, as indeed are all the poems in both sections. Unconsciously, the writer's outlook has been coloured by the measure of his apprehension of the Christian view. In simple truth, apart from that, he could make nothing of life and death at all, but would be utterly in the dark, and driven to despair of his brother-men and himself. The Evangel is his 'all. But it is infinite.

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