The fourth volume of the Georgian series, appearing in 1919, presents a collection that registers the aftermath of war through indirection rather than direct reportage. Editor Edward Marsh's prefatory note expresses hope that 'Peace has not interfered with the writing of good poetry,' a phrase that itself acknowledges the recent conflict without naming it. The anthology's juxtaposition of pastoral scenes with undertones of loss and temporal anxiety creates a distinctive tension. Robert Nichols's 'The Sprig of Lime' and 'Seventeen' exemplify this pattern, using sensory overload—the scent of lime blossoms, the 'gay roar' of wind—to frame moments of acute awareness of time and death.

Sensory Overload and Mortality

In Nichols's 'The Sprig of Lime,' the dying man's request for a lime sprig triggers a cascade of olfactory and visual details: 'sweet-scented starry flowers,' 'honey-wax' clusters, and 'fierce life and summer's prime.' The poem repeatedly invokes the lime tree's fragrance as a conduit to memory, yet the dying man 'smells not' the sprig he clasps. This gap between sensory abundance and the character's withdrawal from it underscores a central pattern in the anthology: the natural world's vitality persists alongside human diminishment. Similarly, in 'Seventeen,' the girl's ecstatic encounter with daffodils—'ten thousand ruffling heads'—is undercut by 'tense tears of spiritual joy' and the unspoken presence of mortality. The poems do not state the war directly, but their preoccupation with fleeting beauty and the 'bitter sense / Of Time that hastes and Death who need not haste' (from 'The Sprig of Lime') suggests a collective awareness shaped by recent loss.

Temporal Disruptions in Pastoral Settings

Several poems in the collection disrupt conventional pastoral timelessness by inserting explicit markers of time's passage. In 'The Sprig of Lime,' the narrative moves from the dying man's present to a remembered 'serene trance of a summer night' years earlier, then to the daughter's present grief. The lime tree's 'curfew secrets' and the 'owl's oaring flight' mark the onset of night, a boundary between life and death. In 'Seventeen,' the girl's shout is 'hushed and abashed' as she becomes aware of her own voice within the 'gay roar' of the wind—a moment of self-consciousness that breaks the childlike immersion in nature. This pattern recurs across the anthology: the natural world is not a static refuge but a stage for sudden temporal ruptures. The editor's selection favors poems where a character's awareness of time—whether through memory, premonition, or the shock of beauty—interrupts the pastoral scene, creating a layered sense of present and past.

The Body as a Site of Tension

Physical details in these poems often carry a weight that exceeds their descriptive function. In 'The Sprig of Lime,' the dying man's hand is 'paltering,' his face 'peaked and gleaming,' and his fingers 'closed ... on the awkward stem.' The daughter's gesture of pressing the lime sprig 'against the stumbling of her heart' literalizes the body's response to grief. In 'Seventeen,' the girl's 'eyelashes were dimmed, / Caught in tense tears'—a physiological reaction that bridges joy and sorrow. These bodily markers—trembling hands, tears, clenched fingers—recur across the anthology, suggesting that the physical self registers what language cannot fully articulate. The poems do not explain the source of this tension, but the repeated focus on bodies in states of heightened awareness (coma, ecstasy, prayer) implies a collective somatic memory of trauma. The anthology thus uses the body as a site where pastoral beauty and historical violence converge, without naming the latter directly.

Readers approaching this volume will find that its pastoral surfaces are repeatedly broken by moments of temporal and sensory dissonance. The poems reward attention to small physical details—a hand closing on a stem, a girl's tears, the scent of lime—as entry points into larger questions about memory and loss. Marsh's selection, made in the immediate postwar moment, offers a record of how English poetry negotiated the return to peace without fully abandoning the war's shadow.