’I am confused in webs and knots of scarlet
  Spun from the darkness;
  Or shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.

  Madness for red!  I devour the leaves of autumn. 
  I tire of the green of the world. 
  I am myself a mouth for blood....’

Perhaps we do wrong to ask ourselves whether this and similar things mean, exactly, anything?  Mr Aiken warns us that his intention has been to use the idea—­’the impulse which sends us from one dream or ideal to another, always disillusioned, always creating for adoration some new and subtler fiction’—­’as a theme upon which one might wilfully build a kind of absolute music.’  But having given us so much instruction, he should have given more; he should have told us in what province of music he has been working.  Are we to look for a music of verbal melody, or for a musical elaboration of an intellectual theme?  We infer, partly from the assurance that ‘the analogy to a musical symphony is close,’ more from the absence of verbal melody, that we are to expect the elaboration of a theme.  In that case the fact that we have a more definite grasp of the theme in the programme-introduction than anywhere in the poem itself points to failure.  In the poem ‘stars rush up and whirl and set,’ ‘skeletons whizz before and whistle behind,’ ’sands bubble and roses shoot soft fire,’ and we wonder what all the commotion is about.  When there is a lull in the pandemonium we have a glimpse, not of eternity, but precisely of 1890:—­

  ’And he saw red roses drop apart,
  Each to disclose a charnel heart....

We are far from saying that Mr Aiken’s poetry is merely a chemical compound of the ’nineties, Freud and introspective Imperialism; but we do think it is liable to resolve at the most inopportune moments into those elements, and that such moments occur with distressing frequency in the poem called ‘The Charnel Rose.’  ‘Senlin’ resists disruption longer.  But the same elements are there.  They are better but not sufficiently fused.  The rhetoric forbids, for there is no cohesion in rhetoric.  We have the sense that Mr Aiken felt himself inadequate to his own idea, and that he tried to drown the voice of his own doubt by a violent clashing of the cymbals where a quiet recitative was what the theme demanded and his art could not ensure.

  ’Death himself in the rain ... death himself ... 
  Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ... 
  I hear the clack of his feet,
  Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
  Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
  Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ... 
  Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...’

We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to say something much subtler.  But to find exactly what he wanted might have taken him many months.  He could not wait.  Up rushed the rhetoric; bang went the cymbals:  another page, another book.  And we, who have seen great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor expedients of the moment.  For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate.  He feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:—­