Richard Aldington’s Poetry
Reading edition
Amy Lowell
What a melancholy thing it is to have to admit that one of our national traits so often interferes with our appreciation of the fine arts, and therefore with the pleasure and profit to be derived from them! As a nation, we are dreadfully impressed by noise. The loud and compelling, even if the blatant, is sure to attract our attention. It is as though we were tone-deaf to all instruments save those of percussion, and colour-blind to all except the primary colours.
This is a particularly unsatisfactory condition, as we are really of a very welcoming temper. We are as anxious to make friends in art as in life. We have no quarrel with originality; on the contrary, it is decidedly pleasing to us. But our sympathies are bounded by our capacities, and our capacities are to a great extent limited to the perception of loud tones and crude colours. To teach the public to hear semi tones and see half-shades, perhaps that is one of the functions of the Imagist poets.
I suppose it is this preoccupation with what Walter Scott used to call “the big, bow-wow style,” which has kept Richard Aldington’s work from being as well understood here as it is in England. The very delicacy of it; its elusiveness, in which suggestions appear and disappear like a blowing mist; its faint, gradually changing colour; all these things confuse the average American poetry lover. While a few people find in Mr. Aldington’s work poetry of a most exquisite and stimulating kind, the great mass of readers turn away bewildered.
This is inconceivable to me. How is it that we do not notice that a man is standing beside us unless he digs us in the ribs with an aggressive elbow? Our own country-woman, who writes under the pen-name of H. D., has had to contend with much of the same partial understanding, and it remained for an Englishman, Mr. Aldington himself, to write an explanation and appreciation of her work in an American magazine—this magazine. It is time that an American should explain to her countrymen the work of the Englishman, who is Richard Aldington.
Water and poetry have a quality in common. They both have a way of seeping—seeping, and without apparent flow, arriving. We are constantly finding fault with American publishers for permitting English firms to bring out the first books of our authors; it is to the honour of America that Richard Aldington’s first book is to appear in the autumn, with the imprint of an American house.
Indeed, in speaking of the non-understanding of the mass of American readers and reviewers, I must add the paradox that the minority here is quicker to perceive excellence than the people of any other country. It is our own magazine Poetry, with its far-seeing and daring editor, who first introduced Mr. Aldington to a considerable public, and her lead was quickly followed by The Little Review; an American firm, the Boni’s, printed a number of his poems in an Anthology: Des Imagistes; and another American firm, Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, printed others in Some Imagist Poets. So Mr. Aldington’s work has seeped little by little to where we can look at it as a reflecting lake. More sputtering brooks of poetry have brawled away and disappeared, but Mr. Aldington’s output lies placid and arresting before us.
What is the quality of this work which makes it at once eluding and enduring? I think it is stark, unsentimental preoccupation with beauty. Mr. Aldington is in love with beauty. “Not,” to quote Leigh Hunt, “in the little present-making style, with baskets of new fruit and pots of roses, but with consuming passion.” There is nothing pretty about this poetry; it is not prettiness, but beauty, that the poet is after.
This naked beauty Mr. Aldington found in the Greeks. One feels that his youth was passed in a kind of painful homesickness, the nostalgia of a beauty which he could not then see about him. Greek poetry and Italian landscape gave him ease, and, solaced and flowering, his first work was under their influence.
I do not know which of Mr. Aldington’s poems first saw the light of day in Poetry, and I have not the volumes here to refer to. But the first collection of his poems in Des Imagistes shows this preoccupation with Greek themes. All of the poems are Greek in feeling, many of them have Greek titles and are perfectly Greek in content. Take this one, for instance:
Bromios
The withered bonds are broken. The waxed reeds and the double pipe Clamour about me; The hot wind swirls Through the red pine trunks. Io! the fauns and the satyrs. The touch of their shagged curled fur And blunt horns! They have wine in heavy craters Painted black and red; Wine to splash on her white body. Io! She shrinks from the cold shower— Afraid, afraid! Let the Maenads break through the myrtles And the boughs of the rohododaphnai. Let them tear the quick deers’ flesh. Ah, the cruel, exquisite fingers! Io! I have brought you the brown clusters, The ivy-boughs and pine-cones. Your breasts are cold-sea-ripples, But they smell of the warm grasses. Throw wide the chiton and the peplum, Maidens of the Dew. Beautiful are your bodies, O Maenads, Beautiful the sudden folds, The vanishing curves of the white linen About you. 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.
I suppose the thing which is so satisfying in Mr. Aldington’s work is the intense feeling which underlies the astringent utterance. With all his stern, uncompromising technique (for Mr. Aldington is a remarkable technician) goes a passionate violence of feeling. The Imagists are constantly accused of being inhuman, mere intellectuals. How strange it is that the feeling which merely turns white and makes no movement should go unperceived, while hysterical screams and lamentations, over in a moment, pass for the outpourings of true passion! What we have outgrown on the stage still holds in poetry, it seems.
Feeling there surely is in Childhood, printed in Some Imagist Poets. Yet, somehow, the poem is not as good as it ought to be. I suspect that Mr. Aldington has not yet quite mastered the technique of the long poem. Feeling is there, and we get the dullness of the little town perfectly, and the stale, salt smell of the harbour; and there are excellent descriptions—the public park, and the wonderful box in the attic—but the poem as a whole does not “get over.” Necessarily more discursive than the shorter poems, it has not enough command of the dramatic to succeed. Having taught himself for years to say things in the fewest possible words, the length of this poem has weakened the poet’s method. He must study the requirements of the longer poem a little more before he will be quite at home in it. Such as it is, Childhood is interesting as showing the broadening of its author’s mind and interests. He no longer sees with the eyes of other centuries; he sees things about him, and as they are.
Here is a perfectly modern picture:
Round-Pond
Water ruffled and speckled by galloping wind Which puffs and spurts it into tiny pashing breakers Dashed with lemon-yellow afternoon sunlight. The shining of the sun upon the water Is like a scattering of gold crocus-petals In a long wavering irregular flight. The water is cold to the eye As the wind to the cheek. In the budding chestnuts Whose sticky buds glimmer and are half-burst open The starlings make their clitter-clatter; And the blackbirds in the grass Are getting as fat as the pigeons. Too-hoo, this is brave; Even the cold wind is seeking a new mistress.
How very well he has given the glinting of the sunlight! And that “Too-hoo, this is brave” is delightfully joyous and adolescent.
Of all the poems which Mr. Aldington has written, The Poplar is certainly the most generally liked. And I am not prepared to say that the public is not right. Perhaps it really is the best, I don’t know. I am very fond of it.
The Poplar
Why do you always stand there shivering Between the white stream and the road? The people pass through the dust On bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars; The wagoners go by at dawn; The lovers walk on the grass path at night. Stir from your roots, walk, poplar! You are more beautiful than they are. I know that the white wind loves you, Is always kissing you and turning up The white lining of your green petticoat. The sky darts through you like blue rain, And the grey rain drips on your flanks And loves you. And I have seen the moon Slip his silver penny into your pocket As you straightened your hair; And the white mist curling and hesitating Like a bashful lover about your knees. I know you, poplar; I have watched you since I was ten. But if you had a little real love, A little strength, You would leave your nonchalant idle lovers And go walking down the white road Behind the wagoners. There are beautiful beaches down beyond the hill. Will you always stand there shivering?
I wish I had space to quote many more of these poems. The Faun Sees Snow for the First Time is a charming bit of humour, and Daisy, very modern, aching, and inevitable. But I will give one more little piece which he calls an epigram:
New Love
She has new leaves After her dead flowers, Like the little almond-tree Which the frost hurt.
This is sophisticated poetry. How often have I not read that in the reviews, couched in terms of reproach! Why? Is it to be desired that the world should not grow? Is it a better art which appeals only to primitive instincts? The primary needs of satisfying hunger, preserving life, procreating life, are all very well, but civilized man has further preoccupations. Mr. Aldington’s is a highly civilized—yes, if you like, a highly sophisticated, art. A certain mellowness of temper is needed to thoroughly appreciate it; crude minds do not react to such delicate stimuli. Admitting that, and admitting it as a feather, not as a rotten egg, we have in Mr. Aldington a lyrist of unusual achievement and fine promise.