Poetry Magazine, Classic Poet: Richard Aldington, October 2000

Poetry Magazine

Richard Aldington
(1892-1962)
Essay by Doug Tanoury,
Associate Editor

UNITED KINGDOM - USA

A Glimpse of Richard Aldington

People have an inborn gift to categorize and catalog. We do it to everything in our world, to things, other people and to ourselves. It is a way to understand concepts quickly and shorthand to reaching conclusions. This method often falls short when faced with complexity. The poet Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is an example of such complexity.

Richard was born at Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, on July 8, 1892. His family moved to Dover, and while he attended Dover College and London University he never obtained a degree. Richard’s education took place at home during the hours he spent reading in father’s expansive library.

He left university and supported himself with a variety of jobs including a newspaper sportswriter. He became active in London literary circles were he met Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in 1911.

In 1912, Richard spent several months in Paris, along with Pound and H.D. Richard and H.D. fell in love and were married in 1913. The marriage was not happy and they separate in 1919 and divorced in 1938. Pound was publishing the first anthology of Imagist poetry, Des Imagistes. This anthology and the hype surrounding the modernist movement still retains the association with both H.D. and Richard Aldington. In fact, for Richard, he is more popular by his association with the Imagistes than by his own work as a poet, novelist, war hero, screenwriter and literary scholar. A lifetime that seems to defy both labels and categorization.

In 1916 at the height of The Great War (WWI) Richard left for military service and after completing initial training he was sent to France. Richard saw action for over two years in the trenches and was badly gassed. He war poetry “Images of War”, was published in 1919. Recently, Richard seems to be breaking out of the narrow Imagist pigeonhole and is being recognized as one of the major poets of WWI.

Richard moved to America just as WWII was beginning. It seems to that from 1940 on, Richard wrote little poetry, but concentrated on novels and short stories. He was fond of writing biographies and completed several, including a Life of Wellington which and a study of D. H. Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius and a biography of T. E. Lawrence.

Richard died in 1962.

In the Trenches

Not that we are weary,
Not that we fear,
Not that we are lonely
Though never alone -
Not these, not these destroy us;
But that each rush and crash
Of mortar and shell,
Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet
That tears the wind like a blade,
Each wound on the breast of earth,
Of Demeter, our Mother, Wound us also,
Sever and rend the fine fabric
Of the wings of our frail souls,
Scatter into dust the bright wings
Of Psyche!

Impotent

Impotent,
How important is all this clamour,
This destruction and contest
Night after night comes the moon
Haughty and perfect;
Night after night the Pleiades sing
And Orion swings his belt across the sky.
Night after night the frost
Crumbles the hard earth.

Soon the spring will drop flowers
And patient creeping stalk and leaf
Along these barren lines
Where the huge rats scuttle
And the hawk shrieks to the carrion crow.

Prelude

How could I love you more?
I would give up
Even that beauty I have loved too well
That I might love you better.
Alas, how poor the gifts that lovers give--
I can but give you of my flesh and strength,
I can but give you these few passing days
And passionate words that, since our speech began,
All lovers whisper in all ladies' ears.
I try to think of some one lovely gift
No lover yet in all the world has found;
I think: If the cold sombre gods
Were hot with love as I am
Could they not endow you with a star
And fix bright youth for ever in your limbs?
Could they not give you all things that I lack?
You should have loved a god; I am but dust.
Yet no god loves as loves this poor frail dust.

Images

Like a gondola of green scented fruits
Drifting along the dank canals of Venice,
You, O exquisite one,
Have entered into my desolate city.

II

The blue smoke leaps
Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing.
So my love leaps forth toward you,
Vanishes and is renewed.

III

A rose-yellow moon in a pale sky
When the sunset is faint vermilion
In the mist among the tree-boughs
Art thou to me, my beloved.

IV

A young beech tree on the edge of the forest
Stands still in the evening,
Yet shudders through all its leaves in the light air
And seems to fear the stars--
So are you still and so tremble.

The red deer are high on the mountain,
They are beyond the last pine trees.
And my desires have run with them.

VI

The flower which the wind has shaken
Is soon filled again with rain;
So does my heart fill slowly with tears,
O Foam-Driver, Wind-of-the-Vineyards,
Until you return.

At the British Museum

I turn the page and read:
"I dream of silent verses where the rhyme
Glides noiseless as an oar."
The heavy musty air, the black desks,
The bent heads and the rustling noises
In the great dome
Vanish...
And
The sun hangs in the cobalt-blue sky,
The boat drifts over the lake shallows,
The fishes skim like umber shades through the undulating weeds,
The oleanders drop their rosy petals on the lawns,
And the swallows dive and swirl and whistle
About the cleft battlements of Can Grande's castle....