He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,
He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.
I did not pray Him to lay bare
The mystery to me,
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
And His own face to see.
_Harold Monro_
The publisher of the various anthologies of Georgian Poetry, Harold
Monro, was born in Brussels in 1879. He describes himself as "author,
publisher, editor and book-seller." Monro founded The Poetry Bookshop
in London in 1912, a unique establishment having as its object a
practical relation between poetry and the public, and keeping in stock
nothing but poetry, the drama, and books connected with these
subjects. His quarterly _Poetry and Drama_ (discontinued during the
war and revived in 1919 as _The Monthly Chapbook_), was in a sense the
organ of the younger men; and his shop, in which he has lived for the
last seven years except while he was in the army, became a genuine
literary center.
Of Monro's books, the two most important are _Strange Meetings_ (1917)
and _Children of Love_ (1919). "The Nightingale Near the House," one
of the loveliest of his poems, is also one of his latest and has not
yet appeared in any of his volumes.