In te, Morte, si pose Nostra ignuda natura; Lieto, no, ma sicura Del antico dolor. Other than that, it is unique. And since it is the fashion to despise a poet because he does not write of aeroplanes and locomotives and socialism, but of the eternal verities of life, death, beauty, irony, let us first of all brush away the shallow assumption that Mr Aldington is an imitator of the classics and that all his work seems a derivation from the Greek. The mood of the poem from which I have just quoted is not a mood which can be found in any Greek poet, or which any Greek would ever have understood. I have quoted enough to show what that mood is. It is a mood of mutability, of the sadness that arises in us when we see the instability of all earthly things. The first Occidental poet who ever expressed this mood, to my knowledge, was François Villon. In the East, of course, it was felt and expressed much earlier. For one must have seen kingdoms pass away and empires crumble to the dust and “the owl sing his watch-song from the towers of Afrasiab” before one can feel this mood, which Mr Aldington has here so beautifully and poignantly expressed. Throughout his poetry Mr Aldington has frequently given us this emotion of a civilized man, a modern, brought face to face with some beautiful fragment of the past. Thus he cries to a Greek marble: I am thy brother, Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee, And thou hearest me not. Surely no one would contend that a Greek could ever have said this! And in some quite recent poems we have the same feeling applied to the Renaissance, and even to modernity: I turn the page and read: “I dream of silent verses where the rhyme Glides noiseless as an oar.” The heavy, musty air, the black desks, The bent heads and the rustling noises Vanish— The sun hangs in the cobalt sky The boat drifts over the bare shallows— The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle About the cleft battlements of Can Grande’s castle. Or take this: London, (May, 1915) Glittering leaves Dance in a squall: Above them, bleak immovable clouds. A church spire Holds up a little brass cock To peck at the blue wheat fields— A pear tree, a broken white pyramid, In a dingy garden, troubles one With ecstasy— And I am tormented, Obsessed, Along all this beauty. With a vision of ruins, Of walls tumbling into clay.