"Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs Or twangs the whining wire; Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs As in hell's forging fire. "From out a high cool cloud descends An aeroplane's far moan; The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends, The black speck travels on. "And sweating, dizzied, isolate In the hot trench beneath, We bide the next shrewd move of fate Be it of life or death." This is painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy by what follows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in all literature, from the wail of David over Jonathan downward, such an expression of the hopeless longing for an irrecoverable presence as informs the broken melodies, the stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of _Ardours and Endurances_:-- "In a far field, away from England, lies A Boy I friended with a care like love; All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries, The melancholy clouds drive on above. "There, separate from him by a little span, Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free, Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man, One with these elder knights of chivalry." It is difficult to qualify, it seems almost indelicate to intrude upon, such passionate grief. These poems form a revelation of the agony of a spirit of superabundant refinement and native sensuousness suddenly stunned, and as it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritual anguish. If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of "Aftermath," where the pain of the soul is abated, and where the poet, scarred and shattered, but "free at last," snaps the chain of despair, these poems would be positively intolerable.