Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/106

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Leopardi and Arnold have since produced great poems in this key: the doomed fragility of the lovely broom bush on the slopes of Vesuvius is an apt and moving image for the despair inspired by the stupendous inequality between what is exquisite within and brutal without; and in Arnold's Empedocles the despair of the man who has neglected life for thought is strangely capped by youth's serene joy in the harmonious world which it inherits. But H. D.'s sculptor, whose statues come to life, not, as in the old story, to content as a mistress or comfort as a wife, but silently to leave him in disdain, or as though they were of too different a nature to commune with him, discovers new abysses of tragic emotion for the indomitable creator's loneliness, ignorance and relative insignificance.

The poem is too long and ill put together to quote as a whole. Too many images are used: that of fire, that of heat, and that of light, no doubt of intense distinctness to the writer, collide together and confuse the reader, who has not shared the long meditations which preceded the pangs and joys of creation. Fortunately by simple omission a satisfying simplicity can be obtained.

PYGMALION

god upon god

Step from the cold rock,

I made the gods less than men,

For I was a man and they my work.

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