Terror: illustrating the poem 'Terror', in a book of poems by Richard Aldington

Hand-coloured woodcut illustrating the poem 'Terror', the eleventh illustration in a book of poems by British poet and novelist Richard Aldington (1892-1926), published by Beaumont Press, London, 1919. This illustration is on p. 41. The image is an abstract depiction of figures of soldiers experiencing the terror of war in a wildly coloured jagged and threatening landscape. The poem begins: 'Those of the earth envy us,/ Envy our beauty and frail strength;/ Those of the wind and the moon/ Envy our pain./ For as a doe that has never born child/ We were swift to fly from terror;/ And as fragile edged steel/ We turned, we pierced, we endured.' The work is taken from one of a series of black-and-white sketches that Nash inscribed with colour notes. These sketches are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. There are copies of this book without the hand-colouring at the Minories, Colchester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 'Images of war' was Aldington's second volume of poetry.