Author: The Good Reader

Precipice by Robert Harris

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Robert Harris’ 2024 novel Precipice is a clever mixture of history and fiction. Britain’s prime minister in 1914, Henry Asquith, married with grown-up children, had some sort of relationship with a much younger woman, Venetia Stanley. That much is fact, because his letters to her survive. Her replies do not and that is what gives Harris the space to create a story about what may have been going on. Asquith’s letters make clear that he had got into the habit of confiding in her about government business and even sending her confidential documents.

Asquith was also in the habit of taking her for drives in his car, the blinds drawn and the chauffeur unaware of what was happening just behind him. He screws up an official telegram and casually throws it out of the window. It is found and handed in by a member of the public and an investigation into a possible security breach is started by the early version of what is now MI5.

There is a powerful sense of the pressure Asquith was under, first to try and find a solution for Ireland and then as events led inexorably to Britain’s involvement in the first world war.

The sheer number of letters and their frequency is staggering. This was made possible by the efficiency of the postal service at that time, with several deliveries each day. It feels like a present-day couple communicating by text message. The question being asked here is whether Venetia Stanley was a necessary support to Asquith when he was under huge pressure or a distraction when his mind should have been on other things.

It’s quite astonishing that Asquith might have been so distracted over Venetia that he wasn’t paying full attention when the cabinet was debating whether the Gallipoli operation should go ahead. No less astonishing is that he couldn’t be quite sure what general Sir John French had actually said about the shell supply situation on the western front because he had sent Lord Kitchener’s letter to Venetia.  

It’s a bit similar to Harris’ earlier novel, Munich, in that it’s more of a character study of a prime minister than anything else. Like that novel, it’s packaged as a thriller but it isn’t really, as the spy plot involving a completely fictional character is rather less convincing and seems a bit “bolted on”. The part where the investigator goes undercover to infiltrate the Stanley family home is the most fictional and the least convincing, I feel.

Harris is on firmer ground with his depiction of a time and a particular class of people. Did Asquith and Venetia actually have a physical affair? Harris hints that upper-class girls knew exactly how to go so far and no further. The suggestion is that whatever they were doing in the back of that car, it wasn’t full intercourse.

There are a couple of historical details that I particularly liked. When Venetia takes a job as a nurse, the artist Sir John Lavery comes to the hospital to do a painting in the ward, featuring Venetia and a wounded soldier. This is a description of a real painting. And I hadn’t realised the extent of the anti-German riots after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Apparently, in Southend, the army was called out to restore order.

Harris is an established and well-connected author, a former Times journalist and something of a political insider. Only someone like that could get the access and necessary permissions from the characters’ descendants to tell a story like this one. I think some of the dialogue seems a bit too modern, but this may be deliberate. The whole situation between Asquith and Venetia feels rather modern. I wondered whether Harris might be trying to draw a parallel with more recent events. Does he have any particular current politician in mind?

But the great strength of this novel is the depiction of how people of that class lived at that time, which is very convincing. When the novel opens, Venetia is a member of a loose group of wealthy young people known as the Coterie. Their cavalier attitude to life is revealed by their reaction to a drowning in the Thames during that carefree summer of 1914.

This world is created so vividly that the historical note at the end about the decline of the Stanley family is rather sad: “Venetia died in 1948 at the age of sixty. By then, the Stanley family’s fortunes were in steep decline. Today, Alderley Park no longer exists; all that remains of Penrhos House are parts of the walls and corner towers, mostly overgrown with ivy, hidden in the woods.”

He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr

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John Dickson Carr was one of those crime writers I had been aware of for years but never got round to reading. For one thing his books were not readily available. When I did read The Hollow Man, often considered to be his masterpiece, I found it rather disappointing. Then I heard the radio versions of the Gideon Fell novels. I was impressed with the plotting and the atmosphere and I decided to give him another go. I’m very glad I did because He Who Whispers is, for me, on a different level to The Hollow Man. It’s an atmospheric and intense read. In fact, I think it’s one of the best stories of this type that I have ever come across.

Carr lived in England for many years and most of his best novels are set here. His work feels as if it belongs more in the English golden age tradition than the American hard-boiled one. He was one of the only American members of the Detection Club and a version of that appears in He Who Whispers, which was published in 1945.    

The war has finally ended and the Murder Club is to hold its first meeting in five years. Miles Harding is the guest of detective Dr Gideon Fell. When he arrives at the Soho restaurant where the meeting is to take place, he finds that none of the members have turned up. There is another guest, Barbara Morell, and the speaker for the evening, Professor Rigaud. Rigaud tells the story he had prepared anyway.

It is the tale of a seemingly impossible murder that took place in rural France in 1939. The victim was found at the top of a ruined tower and there are plenty of witnesses to confirm that no-one else was seen entering the tower during the relevant time. The victim was English and there was a young woman called Fay Seton who was staying with the family. She was romantically involved with the victim’s son and a cloud of suspicion has hung over her ever since. Rigaud shows her photograph to Miles who is fascinated by her.

Miles is looking for someone to help him catalogue his uncle’s book collection in the country house he has inherited. He is living there with his sister Marion who is about to be married to her fiancé Stephen Curtis. The candidate that the employment agency sends is none other than Fay Seton, who has just been repatriated from France and Miles takes her on.  

At the house in the New Forest, another seemingly inexplicable crime takes place. Just who or what is Fay Seton? It is then that Gideon Fell, accompanied by Professor Rigaud, arrives at the house and the investigation begins.

The two mysteries and the non-appearance of the Murder Club members all turn out to be connected of course, but it will be a very astute reader indeed who disentangles all the threads before Dr Fell does. There are many twists and turns along the way and it is a compelling, page-turning read. This is not a conventional whodunnit. There is even a hint of the supernatural. To explain the title would be to give too much away.  

What makes it so special I think, is the quality of Carr’s descriptive writing. He is able to summon up the mood or feel of a place in a few words so that it does not interrupt the pace of the plot. The three main locations come vividly alive. Shabby and exhausted post-war London, a world of back-street flats and overcrowded railway trains, contrasts with the rural peace of pre-war France. The New Forest is seen mostly by moonlight, quiet but almost haunted, unchanged for centuries. Everything feels realistic yet slightly heightened, dovetailing perfectly with the carefully crafted artificiality of the story.

That’s not to say that character or psychology are overlooked. More than one of the people here is not quite what they appear to be at first. The shadow of the war looms large and underneath everything is the mysterious personality of Fay Seton.  

This is ingenious golden age detective fiction at its best, by the acknowledged master of the impossible crime mystery. It is perhaps most similar to the Father Brown stories by G K Chesterton. You either like this sort of thing or you don’t. I very much do and I’ll be on the lookout for more books by John Dickson Carr.    

Memory by Walter de la Mare

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It must be the sunny weather that made me think of the poem Memory by Walter de la Mare. It’s an appropriate one for the changing of the seasons. De la Mare wrote two poems with this title and this is the earlier one that was published in the 1933 collection, The Fleeting.

Perhaps it hints at that all too human tendency to wish oneself elsewhere. The last two lines tell us that De la Mare sees this as a positive thing. Memory enables us to live in our physical surroundings and the world of the imagination at one and the same time.

There is some archaic language in the second verse. “Nowel” is an alternative spelling of “Noel”, and “Waits” are carol singers. This part of the poem requires careful reading because the word order has been inverted in a slightly tricky way.

Memory by Walter de la Mare

When summer heat has drowsed the day
With blaze of noontide overhead,
And hidden greenfinch can but say
What but a moment since it said;
When harvest fields stand thick with wheat,
And wasp and bee slave—dawn till dark—
Nor home, till evening moonbeams beat,
Silvering the nightjar’s oaken bark:
How strangely then the mind may build
A magic world of wintry cold,
Its meadows with frail frost-flowers filled—
Bright-ribbed with ice, a frozen wold!. . .

When dusk shuts in the shortest day,
And dark Orion spans the night;
Where antlered fireflames leap and play
Chequering the walls with fitful light—
Even sweeter in mind the summer’s rose
May bloom again; her drifting swan
Resume her beauty; while rapture flows
Of birds long since to silence gone:
And though the Nowel, sharp and shrill,
Of Waits from out the snowbound street,
Drums to their fiddle beneath the hill
June’s mill-wheel where the waters meet. . .

O angel Memory that can
Double the joys of faithless Man!

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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I first read Raymond Chandler when I was barely out of my teens and now I’ve come to the end of my re-read of his novels with The Long Goodbye. This was the sixth novel featuring his Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. It was published in 1953 and won the Edgar award in 1955. I know a lot of people think it is Chandler’s masterpiece. It is certainly a bit different to the others. It’s longer, moves more slowly and is sadder, somehow. There is more social comment and it’s as much a portrait of a corrupt society as anything Dickens ever wrote.

It’s something of a self-portrait as well with two characters who have elements of Chandler himself about them. If Terry Lennox is damaged by his war experiences, Roger Wade is a writer with a drink problem, who feels that his books are underrated because he writes genre fiction. The overall mood of the book feels as if F Scott Fitzgerald had decided to write a detective story. There are quite a lot of literary references as well, with quotes from T S Eliot, Shakespeare, and Christopher Marlowe.

I think the central theme in the book and what gives it that air of melancholy is Philip Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox, who is introduced in that striking opening sentence: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of the Dancers.”

Later on, Marlowe helps Lennox escape to Mexico without asking too many questions and then comes under suspicion himself when it turns out that Lennox was a suspect in a murder case.

That seems to be that and then Marlowe is asked by a concerned publisher to help the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who is struggling to finish a novel. Rather against his will, Marlowe finds himself drawn further into the lives of the wealthy inhabitants of the appropriately named Idle Valley.

This appears to be a second story, totally unconnected to the first but slowly and surely the connection between the two becomes apparent.

A good example of the atmosphere of the book is the scene where Marlowe stands by the lake at the back of Wade’s house and watches the speedboat and the surfer on the water. This has a kind of poetic resonance but also functions as part of the plot because we later find out that the noise of the engine masked a gunshot.

One thing that strikes me is how modern the book still feels, given that it was published in 1953. It seems to have influenced every depiction of Los Angeles since that time. There are drug-dealing doctors, mysterious out-of-town medical establishments and it all feels rather familiar from later books and films. Press magnate Harlan Potter seems to be the original for the John Huston character in Chinatown. The notorious Los Angeles smog is mentioned quite a lot, twenty years before the photo on the cover of Tim Buckley’s record Greetings from L A.

But then Chandler was a very influential writer in other ways. He didn’t invent the first-person, sardonic, private eye narrator (that was Dashiell Hammett) but he did refine and perfect the idea, giving a model to follow to many later writers such as Len Deighton and, more recently, Philip Kerr.

The phrase the “long goodbye” was mentioned in the news the other day, because of the death of Gene Hackman. It is now used to refer to cases of Alzheimer’s, apparently. That theme is in the book, though almost hidden in what appears to be a sub-plot. When Marlowe is trying to find Roger Wade, his only clue is that the doctor’s name begins with the letter “v”. He finds three such doctors and one of them runs a rather sinister old people’s home, where the frail elderly are kept sedated and presumably fleeced of their money. Later on, a character writes something in their suicide note about not wanting to live to be old so “the long goodbye” does not just refer to Terry Lennox. Did I notice that theme when I was younger? I don’t remember that I did. A really good book reveals more and deeper meanings with the passage of time and re-reading.       

There is also a fascinating connection with the recent TV drama about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, in 1955. One of the detectives explains to Marlowe why the police have not looked further into a murder. “You don’t fool around with an open-shut case, even if there’s no heat to get it finalized and forgotten [. . .] No police department in the world has the men or the time to question the obvious.” This is exactly what happened in the Ruth Ellis case, I think.

Two years later, Chandler wrote a letter to the London Evening Standard criticising the decision to execute Ruth Ellis. He wrote that it was barbaric and that no other country would have done it.

I’ve never seen the 1970s film of The Long Goodbye and I don’t think I want to. It isn’t supposed to have much to do with the book, as it has been updated to the 1970s and the plot has been altered. It’s a pity, because a decent film, done in the correct period, could have been quite something.

Is The Long Goodbye Chandler’s masterpiece? I don’t know, but it does have a haunting quality, with the characters lingering long in the mind. I liked it when I first read it all those years ago and I like it even more now. One of those “books of a lifetime”, I guess.

The Man in the Bowler Hat by A S J Tessimond (Peter Black)

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I discovered The Man in the Bowler Hat in the 2007 anthology, Railway Rhymes. It is credited there to Peter Black and a little research revealed that it was first published under that name in 1943. Peter Black, however, was merely one of the many names used by the poet whose real name was A S J Tessimond (1902–1962). It was published under his own name in 1947.

Tessimond is a somewhat enigmatic figure, highly thought of during his writing career but pretty much forgotten today, perhaps at least partly because of the confusion over his real identity.

The speaking voice of the poem is a persona that the poet has adopted, rather than the poet himself. He is a representative “little man” figure, perhaps bringing to mind G K Chesterton’s “people of England, who never have spoken yet”.

I think I am drawn to the poem because it describes the world my father knew. He was not a “little man” in any sense, but he did wear a bowler hat, smoke a pipe and commute to his work on the train. 

The Man in the Bowler Hat by A S J Tessimond (Peter Black)

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man you looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the
       colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.

I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too softly and seldom.

I am the man they call the nation’s backbone,
Who am boneless – playable catgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am graph, diagram,
Composite face.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining, bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

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The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins was published in 1860 and has often been regarded as the first mystery novel. It is a combination of gothic romance and detective story and still highly readable today, although it does perhaps rely a little too heavily on coincidence. It stays just this side of melodrama, though, and Collins manipulates suspense in ways that would not be out of place in a modern novel. Even at 600 pages, it’s pretty well unputdownable, what we would today call an “immersive” read. It is very intense and very atmospheric.

Collins makes use of an original narrative technique. There are several different narrators, who, as the story progresses, tell the reader about the events that they were actually present at, thorough their journals and legal statements. It’s rather as if they are witnesses in court, as the first narrator, the art tutor Walter Hartright, tells us and it may reflect Collins’ legal background.

The striking scene near the beginning, Walter’s late-night encounter with the woman of the title while he is walking across a lonely Hampstead Heath is deservedly famous. He has just learned that he is to be employed as a tutor at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. The strange and distracted woman who appears suddenly on the road seems to have some connection with the place. This meeting sets the whole complex and intricate plot in motion. Just who she is and what her connection to Cumberland is are key parts of a mystery that is very much concerned with identity and family secrets. There is also a great deal in the book about the position of women in relation to men in the Victorian era.

In Cumberland, Walter finds himself tutor to two young women, Laura Fairlie and her half-sister, Marian Halcombe. He falls in love with Laura and the feeling is mutual but Laura is engaged to Sir Percival Glyde and feels obliged to marry him as it was her late father’s wish. A heartbroken Walter goes abroad and the story is continued by Marian.

Things take a darker turn after the marriage when the scene shifts to Glyde’s country estate in Hampshire. Marian is part of the household as are Glyde’s friend Count Fosco and his wife, who is Laura’s aunt. Glyde turns out not to be quite as charming as he appeared during his courtship of Laura. He insisted on a pre-nuptial arrangement under which Laura’s money would pass to him on her death and he is soon trying to get access to her fortune while she is still alive. To say much more about how things develop would be to spoil the book for those who have not read it. There are plenty of twists and turns that are not easy to predict, even today.

Apart from the unusual narrative structure, Collins shows other great strengths as a writer in this novel. His superb visual sense places the scene right before our eyes. This is used to great effect with the transition from Cumberland to Hampshire, to the gloomy house and grounds named, rather appropriately, Blackwater.

It is perhaps the depth of the characterisation that keeps the reader turning the pages as much as the mystery element. The women are particularly interesting, especially Marian, who is a fascinating character. When Walter first sees her, he admires her figure, but thinks her face “ugly” when she turns round. That does not seem to deter Count Fosco’s admiration of her at all. What is going on here? Is it because she is described as “dark” and he is Italian? It is the blonde, more passive, Laura that Walter falls for. Is Collins just going along with the standard Victorian idea of what is desirable, or is this intended as a subtle criticism of Walter, an indication that he is a bit superficial? I suspect modern readers are likely to think he has chosen the wrong woman and that it is rather unfair for Marian to end up as a sort of perpetual aunt.

Several of the women refer to their limitations as women. Is this to do with their physical strength or their legal position in relation to men? Or is Collins being a bit ironic here, particularly in relation to Marian, given her forcefulness and determination?

The malevolent Mrs Catherick, with her insistence on hard-won respectability, is another interesting character, but perhaps the most fascinating of the female characters is Madame Fosco. The change in her personality after her marriage and Fosco’s utter dominance of her is never really explained although there are hints of something sinister on his part. It feels like an example of what we would now call “coercive control”.

It is in the third part of the novel that the detective element becomes strongest, when Walter has returned from abroad and sets to work to unravel the mystery. Collins is careful to plant details that justify later events in a way that is still used in crime novels now. Perhaps that is the secret of the book’s enduring appeal, the curious combination of things that are very Victorian and things that are timeless or modern. And given some of the stories that make the news these days, has that much really changed since the nineteenth century?

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

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The poem From a Railway Carriage appeared in Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1885.

From their very beginning, railways seem to have inspired more poems than any other form of transport. The fleeting glimpse of something seen from a train window then gone forever features in quite a lot of them.

The first verse here captures that familiar sensation of the landscape moving while the passenger stays still. It’s worth remembering that when this poem was published, a train journey was the only experience of travelling at speed that was available to the ordinary person.

The fast-paced rhythm captures the speed of the train. A similar rhythm was used by W H Auden for the later and more famous Night Mail. The poet Christopher Reid has suggested that Auden might have been influenced by Stevenson’s poem.   

Railway journeys are rich in metaphorical possibilities for the poet. We use the metaphor of life as a journey all the time now. Perhaps that has its origin in railway poems.

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

The Twelve Best Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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In 1927, for a competition in the Strand magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose his own favourite twelve Sherlock Holmes stories. The reader who most closely matched his selection would win the prize. He omitted the later stories that would appear in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, as these had not yet been published in book form. When the result of the competition was announced, he published an article that gave his list and the reason for each choice.

Since I spent part of last summer working my way through The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, I thought it would be interesting to follow in Sir Arthur’s footsteps, by selecting my own favourites and justifying their inclusion on my list.

It seems to me that there are four stories that simply demand to be included.

A Scandal in Bohemia was the first to be published. It’s memorable for the strong female character of Irene Adler and the choreography of the scene where everyone in the street has been employed by Holmes to create a decoy.

The Final Problem is dramatic, fast-moving and ultimately tragic. It raises Holmes’ moral authority because of his willingness to sacrifice himself to rid the world of the evil of Moriarty. The story made the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland famous.

The Empty House is one of the strongest of all the stories, I think, almost three stories in one. There is the dramatic return of Holmes and the story of his survival, Colonel Moran’s attempt to assassinate him, and the locked room murder mystery, all neatly wrapped up together.

His Last Bow was not the last to be published but is the last chronologically. It’s told in the third person, rather than by Watson. Holmes comes out of retirement to crack a German spy ring on the eve of the great war. His moving speech at the end brings the curtain down on their partnership.

So now I have the general shape of my list, what other stories should be included? Doyle himself, in his introduction to The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, refuted the idea that the quality declined after Holmes returned. I agree, so I will be including some of the later ones.

The Speckled Band is so famous that it has to be on the list. It’s a locked-room mystery to rival Edgar Allan Poe and has the connection to India that features in several other stories.

The Musgrave Ritual is an early case of Holmes’, from the days before he knew Watson, the client being one of Holmes’ former fellow students. It has a rather gothic atmosphere with the country house and missing ancient relics and is also notable for being told largely by Holmes himself.

The Reigate Squires has Holmes at his most ingenious in working out the solution to the mystery. We also get an insight into his health. 

The Norwood Builder differs from the usual formula, because the client who comes to Baker Street is then arrested for murder and Holmes must prove his innocence. There is also Holmes’ friendly rivalry with Inspector Lestrade of the Yard. Holmes spots a crucial clue that the police miss, to do with the manipulation of evidence.

Charles Augustus Milverton features the fascinating character of Milverton, a heartless professional blackmailer who is oblivious to the damage he does. Holmes finds him repulsive, and lets natural justice, rather than the law, deal with him.

The Bruce-Partington Plans is a spy story, perhaps a bit similar to the earlier The Naval Treaty, but more complex and better, I think. It starts with that familiar London smog outside the window of Baker Street, but also makes clever use of the London Underground, rather than Hackney Carriages.      

The Illustrious Client is one of the later stories that Doyle did not include on his list. It takes the theme of violence against women that is often there under the surface to a new level. Baron Gruner is truly loathsome, another example of Doyles’ ability to conjure evil on the page. This one is a suitable riposte to anyone who thinks the Holmes stories are a bit “cosy”.

So now I have eleven, I must select another to bring my list up to twelve. The Red Headed League is notable for its sheer absurdity, that makes Holmes and Watson laugh out loud. The Greek Interpreter has the first appearance of Holmes’ brother Mycroft and the Diogenes Club, for the “most unsociable and unclubbable men in London”. Thor Bridge is Holmes at his most ingenious again, but I think The Reigate Squires has the edge, somehow. Doyle excluded Silver Blaze because he said that the racing detail was wrong. That has not affected its fame or popularity with readers, though, so it has to be this one, for the Devon setting and the curious incident of the dog in the night time, which has entered the language.

So here is my full list, in order of publication date, except for His Last Bow, as already explained.

A Scandal in Bohemia   (1891)
The Speckled Band   (1892)
Silver Blaze   (1892)
The Musgrave Ritual   (1893)
The Reigate Squires   (1893)
The Final Problem   (1893)
The Empty House   (1903)
The Norwood Builder   (1903)
Charles Augustus Milverton   (1904)
The Bruce-Partington Plans   (1908)
The Illustrious Client   (1924)
His Last Bow   (1917)

I suspect that every reader of these stories will have their own likes and dislikes. I see that I have only included six that are on Sir Arthur’s list.

Anyone new to Holmes who wants to find out more would find the stories I have chosen a good starting point.  

The Night Will Never Stay by Eleanor Farjeon

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Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) was a well-known writer for children. Her most enduring work is the hymn Morning Has Broken, something we used to sing in junior school days.  

More recently, her book of poems A Sussex Alphabet has been re-issued.

I don’t know exactly when the short poem below was written. Something about it suggest the 1920s, as it almost a minimalist work in a style influenced by modernism.

It is an appropriate poem for the turn of the year, as it is about the inevitability of the passage of time. What fascinates me is the ambiguity of the last line. Is the fleeting nature of the night being seen as a negative or positive thing? After all, one would want sorrow to pass as quickly as possible but for a tune to last longer. A reminder that even the good things will pass, perhaps. It just goes to show how much meaning can be packed into so few words when a poet really knows what they are doing.   

This is another poem that I discovered in that wonderful anthology, Come Hither, compiled by Walter de la Mare and first published in 1923.  

The Night Will Never Stay by Eleanor Farjeon

The night will never stay,
The night will still go by,
Though with a million stars
You pin it to the sky;
Though you bind it with the blowing wind
And buckle it with the moon,
The night will slip away
Like sorrow or a tune.

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular poet in America during his lifetime, but his reputation has declined since then.

I think this simple poem has a very clever rhythmic effect, in that the longer lines that include human action have a faster rhythm than the refrain at the end of each verse, which emphasises the inevitability and the eternal nature of the tide.

The word “hostler” is the American spelling. British English has “ostler”, the man who looks after the horses at an inn or hotel. Is the word “nevermore” a nod to Edgar Allen Poe and “The Raven”?

Despite that, it doesn’t strike me as particularly American. It could almost have been written by Walter de la Mare.

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
      And the tide rises, the tide falls.