Written at the height of the Great War, the poems of this volume are suffused with a sense of melancholy and tragedy. Some of the poems (such as "1915: The Trenches") speak directly of war-time scenes and images, but even those which don't do so are permeated with a feeling of loss and desolation occasioned by the War. In spite of this pervading pathos, however, these poems are also filled with haunting beauty of imagery, drawn as Aiken so often does from natural images of wind, sea, and weather.