Gloucestershire Friends

Synopsis

The secret of Mr. Harvey’s power is that he says what other English lads in Flanders want to say and cannot.... This modest little volume has real charm, and not a little depth of thought and beauty. It contains far more real poetry than many a volume ten times its length.

Bishop Frodsham in The Saturday Review.

The poems are all short—too short. Lieutenant Harvey sings like the wild birds of his own dear Gloucestershire because he cannot help doing so. He stops short—as they do—and like them begins again. What can we do but take what he gives us, wondering that he can write so well, mewed as he is in a cage—and such a cage! An agony of inarticulate longing shrills in a feathered cageling’s song: the man simply and unaffectedly lays bare his heart, his love, his faith, his hope, his sense of loneliness, of ineffectiveness, of baffled purposes and incompleted manhood.

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