THERE seems to be something quite debilitating about being England's poet laureate; perhaps the poet has delivered his message by the time the honor is conferred upon him, or perhaps the realization that he has "arrived" destroys his incentive; it may even be that a poet of wide enough appeal to be so honored has, to meet popular demands, diluted his standards thinner than greatness permits.

However that may be, Masefield's latest production, "A Tale of Troy," is disappointing even to his admirers. It is absorbingly interesting, and as a short story it may live and be enjoyed, but it is an absurd prostitution of an epic theme. The author has imitated classic simplicity and primitive crudeness; he has made his characters tell the tale, and thereby lost the godlike detachment of the theme; he has tried the balled stanza and has made a Indicrous failure of that difficult form so losing all claim to poetic merit. Use of the classic device anacolnthon has made ungrammatical hash, unpalatable, wretched English, as witness the line. "Yet many, like myself, am slave." This is not to say that there are no good lines in the poem, nor that the treatment in places is not amazingly fine, but the whole is no better than its average, and the average entices the reader only with the charm of being interested in a slightly better than journalistic way.