I stayed, where pleasant grassy holms depart;
Those streaming waters, bordered all along;
With daphne and willow herb, sweep sedge, laughing robin;
With woodbind garlanded and sweet eglantine,
And azure-hewed in creeky shallows still
Forget-me-nots lift our frail thoughts to heaven.
Broods o'er those thymy eyots drowsy hum;
Bourdon of glistering bees, in mails of gold.
Labouring from sweet to sweet, in the long hours
Of sunny heat; they sound their shrill small clarions.
And hurl by booming doors, gross bee-fly kin;
(Broadgirded, diverse hewed, in their long pelts;)
That solitary, whiles there light endureth,
In summer skies, each becking clover-tuft haunt.
We do not think that Mr. Doughty should be ignored by anyone who wishes to be familiar with all the good work done in poetry in our time. But, in recommending him, we warn readers that they should approach him almost as they would approach Piers Plowman itself; Chaucer is distinctly more easy and modern.
IMAGES OF WAR. By Richard Aldington. Allen & Unwin. 3s. 6d. net.
WORMS AND EPITAPHS. By H. W. Garrod. Blackwell. 3s. 6d. net.
The first of these small books seems to have been written on active service, the second on return to Oxford after active service. That Mr. Richard Aldington's verse should have a larger content than before is natural; his pre-war verse, to the non-Imagist eye, consisted largely of sweet nothings starred with Greek names. We have here emotional experiences of a less tenuous kind; the poet is coming nearer a comprehension of Keats' remark that poets should express what all men feel. This in Trench Idyll, Time's Changes, Reverie, and other poems he does; and sometimes he conveys the emotion through the medium of a careful picture, as clear in its way as one of Mr. Kennington's drawings. Here is Picket:
Dusk and deep silence ...
Three soldiers huddled on a bench
Over a red-hot brazier,
And a fourth who stands apart
Watching the cold rainy dawn.
Then the familiar sound of birds—
Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,
Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,
And over all the lark
Outpiercing even the robin....
Wearily the sentry moves
Muttering the one word: "Peace."
Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr. Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse. Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths. But a poem in free verse—it is this which chiefly distinguishes Whitman's good from his bad poems—should have a continuous rhythm other than that of prose, and will have it if it is written by a man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr. Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.
Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane, Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping, but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction: