Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/104

Rh I sit here, shading my eyes,

Peeping at you, watching you,

Thinking.

Good! He is truly himself, but the mood has hardly momentum enough to create perfect form. But when at last we get passion we get song.

AFTER TWO YEARS

There is a third stanza, but it rather detracts from these two, which are perfect in and by themselves.

Since I wrote the above Richard Aldington has augmented his gift to the world by two tiny volumes. Reverie and The Love Poems of Myrrhine and Konallis. This last adds a new facet to his talent, for it covers the same ground as Les Amours de Bilitis, by Pierre Louis, compared to which these paragraphs seem shrunk, faint and uninspired. Unenglish pedantries such as "golden-hyacinth-curled hair" or "golden-wrought knees" or "vine-leaf-carved armlet" affect us like the despair of a translator after scratching his head for a long time. "Gold-flowered-crowned drink" indeed! A rhetorical 100