Donald Davie's new sequence of poems, 'Three for Water-Music' [in the volume of the same title] …, refers not only to pleasant 18th-century entertainments by water, but to something like Yeats's 'words for music, perhaps': or like Eliot's Four Quartets, to which the sequence declares some relationship. For Davie's three poems lie somewhere between late Symbolist poetry and a more quietly literal tradition of English topography; they are a species of modern half-abstract landscape poem, which locate in the real certain transparencies of thought. They show concept both created and creating, as a fountain might be heard to rise and fall again. And indeed of the poet's three locations which have given rise to epiphanies, the first and last are, in fact, Sicilian 'fountains' or pools, each named after an Ovidian legend of loss of love; the second is a brown pool in a torrential stream between steep English...