Io! Hear the rich laughter of the forest, The cymbals, The trampling of the panisks and the centaurs. The objectors say that that is merely a copy. It lays itself open to that criticism, certainly, but how exquisite a copy. And how difficult to make such a copy! Try it and see! Mr. Aldington is a master of suggestion. His descriptions are never overloaded, and yet there is the picture. In the next stanza to the last, notice the blowing, rippling linen over the white bodies of the young girls. A little of this goes a long way, you say. Yes, I think that is true, but Mr. Aldington has other strings to play. He has irony, a not-too-common trait in modern poetry. I know few things more beautiful, and more ironical than this: Lesbia Use no more speech now; Let the silence spread gold hair above us Fold on delicate fold; You had the ivory of my life to carve. Use no more speech. .... And Picus of Mirandola is dead; And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of, Hermes, and Thoth, and Christ, are rotten now, Rotten and dank. .... And through it all I see your pale Greek face; Tenderness makes me as eager as a little child To love you You morsel left half cold on Caesar’s plate. That last line is a triumph of the disagreeable. Mr. Aldington’s beauty does not cloy; he knows how to spice it: In the Via Sestina O daughter of Isis, Thou standest beside the wet highway Of this decayed Rome, A manifest harlot. Straight and slim art thou As a marble phallus; Thy face is the face of Isis Carven As she is carven in basalt. And my heart stops with awe At the presence of the gods. There beside thee on the stall of images Is the head of Osiris Thy lord. Even in this first collection we see that the Greek awakening was a real awakening, and that once taught to see, the poet can go on seeing. The charge of copying is unfair. There is no “copying” in this: Au Vieux Jardin I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds Which the wind of the upper air Tore like the green leafy boughs Of the divers-hued trees of late summer; But though I greatly delight In these and the water lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them. I think that is one of the best poems which Mr. Aldington has done. “The rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones” almost sets me weeping too, so desolate are they, with the yellow grasses growing up between them.