I
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.
V
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.
About This Poem
“Images” by Richard Aldington was first published in 1916 in Aldington’s collection, Images, Old and New (The Four Seas Press, 1916). One of the founders of Imagist poetry, Aldington aimed to replace abstractions with exactness of observed detail and apt metaphors.
Richard Aldington was a novelist, critic, essayist, translator, and a founding poet of the Imagist movement. He died on July 27, 1962, in France.
