B0 0 KS
We shot him down.
His sky blasted, vision wasted,
Hunger stinted, love and .birth
Stunted. From a high dream of leisure
We brought him back to earth.
421
Edith Sitwell's poems are also about Love, Death, and the Dream,
but her transcendant power in this late volume gives her poetry an
appalling topicality. She deals with
thos~
basic rhythms of life and the
universe which, Toynbee says, overwhelm and obsess the unhappy souls
of a dying society. The death-wish of the world works itself out in an
infinite number of repetitive rhythms of which the master rhythm is the
series of identical unsuccessful responses made by a disintegrating civili–
zation to the single invincible challenge of the Adversary. Let's say, in
shorthand, that in Miss Sitwell's world, man responds with a will-to–
Power or Sex or Love to the challenge of mechanized war'or Death. Like
the poet who wrote;: "the thing that hath been is that which shall be,
and that which is done is that which shall be done," Miss Sitwell writes:
All is the same:
The heroes marched like waves upon the shore:
Their great horizons, and the kiss
Of lovers, and of atoms, end in this
.
0 bitter love, 0 Death that came
To steal all that I own.
Death is "the world's last love" and it speaks with numberless rhythms,
"the fly-like whispering of small hopes, small fears / The gossips of
mean Death-gadflies and gnats ... " Ne,urosis turns in upon itself:
And the lost men, the rejected of life, who tend wounds
That life has made as if they were a new sunrise
...
In the poem called "Lo, this is she, that was the world's desire" (which
makes Miss Sitwell nearly the equal of Yeats in describing old age),
there is the full horror of reversion:
...
and none may know
Seeing the ancient wrinkled shadow-shape
If this be long-dead Venus, or the Ape
Our great precursor.
...
