Of peace and plenty, bed and board,

That chance employment may afford."

Or:

"Oh hush thee, my baby,

Thy cradle's in pawn:

No blankets to cover thee

Cold and forlorn.

"The stars in the bright sky

Look down and are dumb

At the heir of the ages

Asleep in a slum."

Implicit in the entire book is the very Eton-Oxford communism held by Day Lewis and Auden and Spender, who have just discovered how the other half lives--that is, the people on the less fashionable side of the railroad tracks. The absence of personal apostrophes to "Wystan" and "Rex"--W. H. Auden and R. E. Warner--constitutes a gain in intelligibility, though even the shorter poems in the volume, such as "The Conflict" and "In me Two Worlds," which state the problems of the group almost as nicely as any prose manifesto, still want something in appeal to the moiling masses. It would be really a pity if Day Lewis and his colleagues turn out to be Walt Whitmans, rejected by the people whom they would serve. For one suspects that they have forgotten (or perhaps they have never known) the hard truth, "Nothing is further from the common people than the corrupt desire--to be common people," if one may amend Mr. Santayana's dictum.