Have you forgotten yet?...
  Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget.

Mr. Sitwell’s satires—­which occupy the most interesting pages of Argonaut and Juggernaut—­seldom take us into the trenches.  Mr. Sitwell gets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms.  These “free-verse” satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of War-horses, in which the “septuagenarian butterflies” of Society return to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through: 

  But now
  They have come out. 
  They have preened
  And dried themselves
  After their blood bath. 
  Old men seem a little younger,
  And tortoise-shell combs
  Are longer than ever;
  Earrings weigh down aged ears;
  And Golconda has given them of its best.

  They have seen it through! 
  Theirs is the triumph,
  And, beneath
  The carved smile of the Mona Lisa,
  False teeth
  Rattle
  Like machine-guns,
  In anticipation
  Of food and platitudes. 
  Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci!

Mr. Sitwell’s hatred of war is seldom touched with pity.  It is arrogant hatred.  There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with age.  He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining that Christ did not die—­

                      Like a hero
  With an oath on his lips,
  Or the refrain from a comic song—­
  Or a cheerful comment of some kind.

His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with the spirit of Christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him.  He is moved to write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by the passionate force of ideals of his own.  He is a sceptic, not a sufferer.  His work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain.  It is a clever brain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will infuriate the right people.  They may not kill Goliath, but at least they will annoy Goliath’s friends.  David’s weapon, it should be remembered, was a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter.

The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to take poetry quite seriously.  His non-satirical verse is full of bright colour, but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but of captive birds in an aviary.  It is as though Mr. Sitwell had taken poetry for his hobby.  I suspect his Argonauts of being ballet dancers.  He enjoys amusing little decorations—­phrases such as “concertina waves” and—­

  The ocean at a toy shore
  Yaps like a Pekinese.

His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of a ballet: 

  An owl, horned wizard of the night,
  Flaps through the air so soft and still;
  Moaning, it wings its flight
  Far from the forest cool,
  To find the star-entangled surface of a pool,
  Where it may drink its fill
  Of stars.