Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/101

Rh Soot; mud;

A nation maddened with labour;

Interminable collision of energies—

Iron beating upon iron,

Smoke whirling upwards,

Speechless, impotent.

In vain the shrill, far cry

Of kittiwakes that fly

Where the sea waves leap green.

The meadows Apriline—

Noise, iron, smoke;

Iron, Iron, Iron.

To my ear and understanding this is improved by the omission of lines 1, 11, 16, 21 and 22. Accumulations of nouns and adjectives are characteristic of imagists, inelegancies of syntax give much of their work the air of a translation, as though the difficulty of following a foreign idiom had overstrained the resources of the writer.

PEOPLE

Rh