“Lines for a Sun-Dial” was included in Alfred Noyes’s The New Morning (Frederick A. Stokes, 1907). About Noyes’s shorter poems, poet Edward Davison writes in his essay “The Poetry of Alfred Noyes,” published in The English Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4 (April 1926), “His verse, even when, as in The Torch Bearers, it deals with the very quality and range of the human intellect in its finest in stances, is never intellectual. It means just what it says and no more. We cannot plunge through the superficial meaning into depth after depth of parallel meaning, as in the poems of Walter de la Mare and W. B. Yeats. In the strictest sense of the word Alfred Noyes is a ‘simple’ poet. Perhaps ‘elementary’ would be a better word. He is to be compared with Longfellow rather than with Wordsworth, both simple poets in the superficial sense of the word. But to say that his poetry is shallow is not to say that the best of it is shallow in feeling. It is only shallow in the sense that it is obvious. One does not return to Noyes’s poetry with the knowledge that each new reading will increase our sense of its significance. Its values are face values; its music that of a ballad, not of a madrigal.”