Wind rushes Over the dunes, And the coarse salt-crusted grass Answers. Heu, It whips round my ankles! This is only one-half of the poem, but it will serve to show this poet’s method. Here Hermes is identified with the yellow barrier of sand dunes which breaks the wind, and splits it into three directions, as it comes in from the sea. The scenery and the feeling are not Greek. In fact, as someone has pointed out, the whole poem might have been called “The Coast of New Jersey.” But just as Coleridge found a way to give a feeling of the emptiness of the sea by narrating the tale of a legendary voyage on it, so H. D. has given us the eternal quality of the New Jersey coast by identifying its savagery with Greek myth. The difference between H. D.’s poetry and Aldington’s is therefore a difference between an apparent complexity which cannot be analysed, since it is really the simplest synthesis of primitive feeling, and a studied simplicity which on analysis, reveals itself as something very complex and modern. Aldington’s work when studied carefully, raises questions about our life: H. D. goes deeper and offers us an eternal answer. With the single exception of the _Choricos_, I know of no work of H. D.’s which is not superior to Aldington’s in rhythm, as I know of no work of Aldington’s which does not seem to have more unsolved problems underlying its thought. Aldington is monodic, H. D. is strophaic: Aldington writes on many themes: H. D. on two or three: H. D.’s art is more perfect within its limits; Aldington’s is more interesting because of its very human imperfection. There is another short thing of H. D.’s which fulfils perfectly the Greek dictum that a picture is a silent poem, a poem a speaking picture: Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines, over our rocks. Hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir. A chorus of Oreads might very well have sung that to the wind. Over and over again, H. D. never tires of giving us the sea, the rocks, the pines, the sunlight. There is such a hard brightness of sunlight in some of the poems that it makes us fairly dizzy with its intensity: O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it sideways. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air: fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat, plough through it, turning it on either side of your path. These poems are like cries to unknown gods. Some are simply stark in their dramatic magnificence: The Wind Sleepers Whiter than the crust left by the tide, we are stung by the hurled sand and the broken shells. We no longer sleep, sleep in the wind, we awoke and fled through the Peiraeic gate.