The White Cliffs

THE story told in verse is not a popular literary form of today, but this series of short poems is a successful example of it. Susan Dunne, a young American girl, meets and falls in love with a young Englishman in 1914. They marry; she has a son; her husband is killed in the war. She brings up her boy in England as his father would have wished, and now he is ready to go to the war in his turn. That is all; but it is told with understanding, incisiveness, deep feeling, and a pretty satiric wit. Susan meets her future mother-in-law for the first time: —

’You’re an American, Miss Dunne,
Really you do not speak like one.'
She seemed to think she’d said a thing
Both courteous and flattering.

The emotional tone of the various episodes is skillfully matched in the movement of the verse, and the conclusion gives a poignant stab.

I am American bred,
I have seen much to hate here — much to forgive,
But in a world where England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.