Who can have trod, before, this field of fire The huge floor of ocean, unfoamed, shining, Lit with loud stars and mellow harvest moon? The sea-nymphs swimming by the galleon’s side Have never shone, golden, in its wake before: Like winds they play among the corn’s gold tide Loosing those windy locks, or down they dive Through amber furrows lifted by the keel, Past starlight, crackling to the sad shell note Of scalèd Tritons in deep water depths. Mr. Sitwell’s modernism appears in such lines as the second and fifth, which the Elizabethans or Jacobeans, great as were the liberties they took with blank verse (far greater than those taken by the eighteenth century or the Victorians) could not have written for a gentle lyrical passage. They would have put instead: The húgy flóor of ócean foámless shíning and Have ne’ér shone gólden ín its wáke befóre. The first of these lines of Mr. Sitwell’s must be read: The húge flóor of ócean (pause) unfoámed (pause) shíning and the next Have néver shóne (pause) gólden (pause) in its wáke béfóre. Here the influence of modern music reveals itself in the readiness with which the monotony of the metrical pattern is varied. It is rarely, indeed, in a poem of modernist blank verse that so few variations are introduced as in this passage. The pictorial element is also modern. ‘The loud stars’, ‘the corn’s gold tide’, the nymphs diving ‘crackling’ down, are not Elizabethan conceits but verbal equivalents for a modern picture in which the size and shape of the stars, the cornfield aspect of the sea, the sharpness of the water-flurry where the nymphs dive would be anti-realistically represented to suggest just these figures. Fletcher would have written ‘bright stars’ and Like winds that wanton in the yellow corn, So do they wanton in this golden tide and shivering the sad shell note and so on. These lines of T. S. Eliot’s further illustrate the tendency in contemporary poetry to outdo the past in elaborate and elegant writing; that is, to flout conservative literary elegance rather than elegance in general. They are an improvement on all previous treatments of a favourite refined topic--perfumes: In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered or liquid--troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coppered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. How pale indeed is Keats beside him: