We are far from saying that Mr Aiken's poetry is merely a chemical compound of the 'nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency in the poem called 'The Charnel Rose.' 'Senlin' resists disruption longer. But the same elements are there. They are better but not sufficiently fused. The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in rhetoric. We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the theme demanded and his art could not ensure. 'Death himself in the rain ... death himself ... Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ... I hear the clack of his feet, Clearly on stones, softly in dust, Speeding among the trees with whistling breath, Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ... Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...' We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to say something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted might have taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric; bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seen great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor expedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:-- 'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest, When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone, Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?' So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or, if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the thematic outline itself emerges.