Among the most beautiful things in Mr. Sassoon's Collected Poems of 1947, the sonnet "At the Grave of Henry Vaughan" will come to mind as Sequences is read, not merely because Vaughan is again honoured by name in this new book, but as some affinity of temperament again appears to exist between our living poet and the old one. The impression given by Mr. Sassoon's pages is of a recluse seeking (as did the Silurist) some spiritual light, often under the stars, and of a solitary wayfarer pausing beneath a tree, noting the butterfly and the primrose, riding along the farthest farm-track. "Alone with life," he contemplates and reconsiders the mind and soul, and derives from all he has seen in our world some prospects of the eternal. Occasionally it might be pardonable to mistake a passage from Mr. Sassoon, if it were quoted without ascription, for one from Vaughan:

I think: If through some chink in me could shine
But once—O but one ray
From that all-hallowing and eternal day,
Asking no more of Heaven I would go hence.

Lyrics, or perhaps more accurately elegiacs on philosophical or religious themes, form the larger part of Sequences. They are records of meditation on the state of man, and what he may perceive and believe. They have a tranquil though not inactive beauty and sometimes a particular landscape or an hour with nature away from even the village streets exhibits a poetical delight long associated with Mr. Sassoon's books. He does not extend these descriptive passages as once he might have done, but the thought or "intimation" of the poem is its chief business. In "The Message" he is prompted by a beautiful sunset in November, and to that extraordinary beauty he gives only a few verses—but those are equal to the occasion:

Cloud streaks and shoals, like silver wings outspread,
Spanned innocent serenities of blue,
As though, enharmonized with life below,
Some heavenly-minded message had been said.
Thus, childlike, I imagined. Yet it might be true.

In "October Trees" we discern not only a valediction to the pride of the year but to the season of youth:

How innocent were these
Trees, that in mist-green May,
Blown by a prospering breeze
Stood garlanded and gay:
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious colour clad
Confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad.

We are familiar with Mr. Sassoon's conversation-poems and such apparently easy-going pieces, and some of the kind now have their place in Sequences and diversify the book very agreeably. His peculiar skill in sketching people and places, himself and his tastes included, provides us with the amusing portrait of "old Mr. Hardy, upright in his chair" at Max Gate, quite a pleasing gentleman but with nothing in the least about him to identify him with "the Wessex wizard" of such mighty achievement. A more elaborate, historical, and imaginative piece offers a study of Grey of Fallodon in his last years. Mr. Sassoon treats himself with pleasant humour in "Cleaning the Candelabrum," but there is more in his allusions to former days and men and women, and our own kind of progress, than the manner of the poem might seem to say.

The writer of Sequences, as has been noticed, would easily be described on the evidence of the book as a hermit or an unusually private man; but there is much in these poems which the anxieties of our age, the confusions and the shocks, have evoked from one who watches all. There is not in this volume the burningly indignant Sassoon of the war poems, unless "A Post-Mortem" is in its way a counter-attack in brief. In "The Worst Of It" again the poet is in a mood of dilemma over Man's mind and soul, and the "armaments of flame" which Man has made. But "The Best of It," instantly following, rings out confidently, asserting "Life, that by no disaster is undone."