Francis Brett Young

Francis Brett Young, who is a novelist as well as a poet, and who has been called, by The Manchester Guardian, "one of the promising evangelists of contemporary poetry," has written much that is both graceful and grave. There is music and a message in his lines that seem to have as their motto: "Trust in the true and fiery spirit of Man." Best known as a writer of prose, his most prominent works are Marching on Tanga and The Crescent Moon.

Brett Young's Five Degrees South (1917) and his Poems 1916-18 (1919) contain the best of his verse.

Lochanilaun

This is the image of my last content:
My soul shall be a little lonely lake,
So hidden that no shadow of man may break
The folding of its mountain battlement;
Only the beautiful and innocent
Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake
Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake
Of churned cloud in a howling wind's descent.
For there shall be no terror in the night
When stars that I have loved are born in me,
And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair;
But this shall be the end of my delight:—
That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see
Your image in the mirrored beauty there.