Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/108

Rh I have read, either in French or in English, produced by the so-called rebel poets. This cry over the soul's effort that is lost in the world is grander than anything I have quoted from these Soldier Poets. Have we not seen man's wonderful creations go out from the workshop and join themselves to the hostile gods, the inclement conditions of his life. How many creeds, how many social orders that seemed stable and trustworthy have melted into air! or, like soiled and rusting weapons, gangrened wounds dealt those they were fashioned to defend! Vast wealth, created at immense cost in toil, in shame, in wrong and in suffering, is even now being used to damage and destroy men on a huger scale than earthquakes achieve. This image goes deeper than the forlorn agony of the artist; it is a universal tragedy that what we make makes us and then breaks us like a hostile power; and can we know that we are shaped by divinity, when it is the outside pressure that hews roughly and desecrates our hopes? Passion and power are present in others of H. D.'s poems, but nowhere else so successfully.

Like Orestes and Electra, this young poet and poetess stand hand in hand, and a sculptor might well draw a splendid inspiration from their intrepidity; but perhaps painting could better express how they face the colossal wickedness of the modern world and its tragedy, as the children of Agamemnon faced the cumulative murderous treacheries of "Pelops' line." Young, severe, and determined to live and die in defence of that ideal beauty that for us as for them is called Greece, let us picture them under the dark pall of the war, but behind them a glimpse of those blue seas and temple-crowned cliffs. Or shall he show her his hands as in a little prose poem written from the trenches?

"I am grieved for our hands, our hands that have caressed roses and women's flesh, old lovely books and 104