How vividly I can recall the breaking of the War storm of 1914, more than thirty years ago! I was still living in Portland, and on a certain Saturday - I feel sure it was a Saturday - suddenly unusual noises alarmed us all, bugles calling vociferously, rockets whizzing and banging, a man hurrying along, shouting while he rang a large bell. All this din was to hasten the return to their ships of hundreds of sailors who had strayed over the Island. Soon numbers of jack-tars appeared, panting with hard running, and in a few minutes all were aboard their ships in the harbour.

Then there broke out a very pandemonium of madness among the crews of the fleet of many ships. Onlookers, of whom I was one, gazed with astonishment at large quantities of good furniture, sofas, chairs, tables, bookcases, beds, and many pianofortes being thrown overboard and tumbled into the salt water. Only the bare necessities were allowed to remain on the ships. All peace-time comforts and luxuries were ruthlessly sacrificed, and in an hour or so, one by one the ships, great and small, steamed out to sea, all ready and cleared for action. So ended the first Act for us in Portland of the titanic Drama of the next four years.

Soon after that exciting Saturday I recieved Harold Monro's invitation to visit him for a week or more at his Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire street, near the British Museum. I travelled to London in an over-crowded train and during most of the journey had to seat myself on my small suitcase, containing besides necessary clothing etc. a few M.S. volumes of my verses.

Harold Monro received me very hospitably, and gave me a little room to sleep in at the top of the house from the windows of which I obtained good views of roofs and chimney pots, and a glimpse of the British Museum. My host told me that on that very evening there was to be one of the periodical gatherings of poetry reading, in the large room above the shop, at which several poets, including himself were going to read pieces of their recent work.

He asked me to join them and give them an opportunity of sampling my verse. This request made me somewhat nervous, but in the hour or so before the meeting I chose two little poems from my M.S. books to read, if I were asked again.

I discovered that Monro was more than a dozen years younger than myself, and had already published four volumes of poetry, and was about to bring out another to be called 'Trees'. I had two volumes to my credit - or otherwise - and another was soon to be published. Somehow I could not help feeling then, and afterwards, when the poetry makers and readers arrived, as if I properly belonged to an earlier generation, and spoke a different language to express other ideas than those of Monro and his friends.

T. Sturge Moore was the first to join us. He appeared to be a few years older than Monro, but not as old as I was. He lived in chambers, not far from Devonshire Street. Only three others turned up, a young man called John Freeman, Wilfred Gibson and Siegfried Sassoon, on leave from France. These were both young men of about thirty.

Sturge Moore, besides being a poet, was an engraver and designer of bookplates, and, before we settled down to the business of the evening, showed us a few of the latest of these he had designed. He appeared to be very full of strange notions about William Blake. These had evidently been simmering in his mind for months and he seemed relieved when he had passed them on to us.

What these novel ideas were I am sorry not to be able to recall so long afterwards. He read two of his own poems to us, only one of which I can remember, a very beautiful lullaby, beginning

He read these lines so solemnly that I began to think he meant his verses to refer to that last long sleep our tired bodies will not awake from.
Monro followed with a poem of his entitled 'Solitude'. The first verse went like this -

I thought how appropriate after Sturge Moore's Lullaby!

Monro adopted the chanting manner of reading verse: Moore was more natural.
Siegfried Sassoon read - chanted rather - one of his realistic War-poems, for which he became so famous later on. But I much preferred another that he recited - not read - called 'Everyone Sang'.

Gibson read a homely poem of North Country life in a factory, I forget which piece it was. I followed with one of the two I had chosen, there was no time for more. We had some refreshment and parted.

About the middle of my first week at the Poetry Bookshop, Monro had another visitor for a couple of days and nights. This was Ezra Pound, whom I first could not understand, hardly knowing where to place him in my estimation. Some of his poetry seemed to me to possess a beauty as elusive as its meaning was, while other verses shone only with the unhealthy lustre of decay and shocked me by their ugly obscenity. His conversation often smelt, as it were, of putridity and death, which seemed to arise from what I could not help likening to a hidden cesspit into which for years the filth of a decadent soul had been draining. Ever and anon, out of the corruption and sludge would appear a lovely, though generally an erotic flower. Indeed, he puzzled me greatly, and in the end I was glad when he left us, and I could breathe pure air once more. Yet more than once I thought that I could detect in his manner and mood a revulsion against the degradation into which he had fallen, and even a prayer, albeit unspoken, to be delivered from the evil one. What really happened to him afterwards? I wish I knew. More than once through the following years I heard rumours of this unhappy man, how he became more and more decadent, his conversation more and more coarse and obscene. And finally I have been told that he was caught by the cruel Nazi beast, held in its claws until he became as noisome as his vile captor. So terrible was the due punishment of such depravity, that of, being filthy, to be filthy still, loving his evil self, continually to have a viler and still viler self to love.

Another visitor, who arrived the day before I left and stayed on afterwards for several days was Wilfred Gibson, a poet less brilliant but saner than Pound. From the little I heard of his conversation and read of his writings I was glad to realise that he could 'feel the heartbreak in the heart of things', to quote one of his own lines, and make himself one with the humblest worker, "the man who hews the coal to feed my fire", as he said.

The day after he came to the Poetry Bookshop, I left for the rocky Isle again, glad to have come in contact with so many younger poets, though obliged to confess that they all could be classified as minor.