Year's at the Spring, The

London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1920. Harry Clarke Illustrates from Hilaire Belloc to William Butler Yeats
Twelve superb color plates, Twelve tinted plates
and twenty-two black and white Vignettes

[CLARKE, Harry, illustrator]. [WALTERS, Lettice d'Oyly, compiler]. The Year's at the Spring. An Anthology of Recent Poetry Compiled by L. d'O. Walters and Illustrated by Harry Clarke. With an Introduction by Harold Monro. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.,1920.

First UK trade edition. Quarto (10 7/16 x 8 inches; 265 x 203 mm.). [1-4], 5-127, [1] pp. Twelve full-page color plates, twelve full-page black and white plates, and twenty-two black and white vignettes.

Publisher's light tan cloth over boards, front cover and spine pictorially stamped in black and red. Neat name and date (1922) on front paste-down. A fine copy.

Contains poems by Hilaire Belloc, Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton, W.H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, Alice Meynell, Harold Monro, James Stephens, William Butler Yeats, and others.

"Harraps commissioned the Year's at the Spring Anthology illustrations as a result of the great success of the Poe illustrations and promised Bodkin, who had felt there should have been colour in the Poe, that there would be twelve colour plates as well as twelve black and white...There are some haunting images—unearthly, soulful and beautiful among these illustrations. There is none of the dread, the fear, the agonized foreboding and horror of the Poe. Here, the dead are depicted hooded in watery crimson, like exotic submarine flowers in vertically wavering strands, or feathers melting into the carriage of the beautiful Queen of the Dead. Many of the illustrations are set on, beside or beneath the surface of the sea and feature stylized submarine flora and fauna; galleons recur frequently. The Japanese and generally Oriental influence, so prevalent in the work of decorative designers and illustrators of the day, is noticeable; two of the finest illustrations—those to Lettice d'Oyly Walter's All is Spirit and Part of Me and Rupert Brooke's The Great Lover (‘Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming...') cut across the page in a dramatic whiplash. Some are whimsical, a few are a little weak. Thomas McGreevy thought St. Augustine and his band of monks, an illustration to Elroy Flecker's The Dying Patriot, ‘the most perfect of all Mr. Clarke's drawings'. Harry's own features recur often—(e.g. in the illustration to H.H. Abbott's Black and White, where ‘the cold white face' is his, peering out through the mist, hatted and coated on the kerb of the poplar-lined Mount Merrion Avenue; and as one of The Dead)" (Bowe, pp. 55-56).

Bowe, p. 149, no. 4; Steenson. A Bibliographical Checklist of the work of Harry Clarke, A3.b.