The phases of Edith Sitwell’s poetry resemble a continuing argument between the two poles of her inspiration, between romance and satire, affirmation and irony; now one gains the ascendancy, now the other, in method as in content. In her poems from Still Falls the Rain to The Canticle of the Rose they seem to find a resolution within a larger synthesis: the depth of tenderness and compassion, the understanding of human desolation that so poignantly informed The Little Ghost Who Died for Love are there, and at the same time the savage mockery of Gold Coast Customs; the dream-like incantations of The Sleeping Beauty and the hard drum-beat of rhythms first evolved in Nursery Rhymes.