THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH AND

OTHER POEMS

BY ALDOUS HUXLEY,

AUTHOR OF "THE BURNING WHEEL."

CONTENTS

Page

The Defeat of Youth 5

Song of Poplars 16

The Reef 17

Winter Dream 19

The Flowers 20

The Elms 21

Out of the Window 21

Inspiration 22

Summer Stillness 23

Anniversaries 23

Italy 25

The Alien 26

A Little Memory 27

Waking 28

By the Fire 29

Valedictory 31

Love Song 32

Private Property 33

Revelation 34

Minoan Porcelain 34

The Decameron 35

In Uncertainty to a Lady 35

Crapulous Impression 36

The Life Theoretic 37

Complaint of a Poet Manqué 37

Social Amenities 38

Topiary 38

On the Bus 39

Points and Lines 39

Panic 40

Return from Business 40

Stanzas 41

Poem 42

Scenes of the Mind 43

L'Après-Midi D'un Faune 44

The Louse-Hunters 48

THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH

I. UNDER THE TREES.

There had been phantoms, pale-remembered shapes

Of this and this occasion, sisterly

In their resemblances, each effigy

Crowned with the same bright hair above the nape's

White rounded firmness, and each body alert

With such swift loveliness, that very rest

Seemed a poised movement: ... phantoms that impressed

But a faint influence and could bless or hurt

No more than dreams. And these ghost things were she;

For formless still, without identity,

Not one she seemed, not clear, but many and dim.

One face among the legions of the street,

Indifferent mystery, she was for him

Something still uncreated, incomplete.

II.

Bright windy sunshine and the shadow of cloud

Quicken the heavy summer to new birth

Of life and motion on the drowsing earth;

The huge elms stir, till all the air is loud

With their awakening from the muffled sleep

Of long hot days. And on the wavering line

That marks the alternate ebb of shade and shine,

Under the trees, a little group is deep

In laughing talk. The shadow as it flows

Across them dims the lustre of a rose,

Quenches the bright clear gold of hair, the green

Of a girl's dress, and life seems faint. The light

Swings back, and in the rose a fire is seen,

Gold hair's aflame and green grows emerald bright.

III.

She leans, and there is laughter in the face

She turns towards him; and it seems a door

Suddenly opened on some desolate place

With a burst of light and music. What before

Was hidden shines in loveliness revealed.

Now first he sees her beautiful, and knows

That he must love her; and the doom is sealed

Of all his happiness and all the woes

That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter.

The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter--

And love flows in on him, its vastness pent

Within his narrow life: the pain it brings,

Boundless; for love is infinite discontent

With the poor lonely life of transient things.

IV.

Men see their god, an immanence divine,

Smile through the curve of flesh or moulded clay,

In bare ploughed lands that go sloping away

To meet the sky in one clean exquisite line.

Out of the short-seen dawns of ecstasy

They draw new beauty, whence new thoughts are born

And in their turn conceive, as grains of corn

Germ and create new life and endlessly

Shall live creating. Out of earthly seeds

Springs the aerial flower. One spirit proceeds

Through change, the same in body and in soul--

The spirit of life and love that triumphs still

In its slow struggle towards some far-off goal

Through lust and death and the bitterness of will.

V.

One spirit it is that stirs the fathomless deep

Of human minds, that shakes the elms in storm,

That sings in passionate music, or on warm

Still evenings bosoms forth the tufted sleep

Of thistle-seeds that wait a travelling wind.

One spirit shapes the subtle rhythms of thought

And the long thundering seas; the soul is wrought

Of one stuff with the body--matter and mind

Woven together in so close a mesh

That flowers may blossom into a song, that flesh

May strangely teach the loveliest holiest things

To watching spirits. Truth is brought to birth

Not in some vacant heaven: its beauty springs

From the dear bosom of material earth.

VI. IN THE HAY-LOFT.

The darkness in the loft is sweet and warm

With the stored hay ... darkness intensified

By one bright shaft that enters through the wide

Tall doors from under fringes of a storm

Which makes the doomed sun brighter. On the hay,

Perched mountain-high they sit, and silently

Watch the motes dance and look at the dark sky

And mark how heartbreakingly far away

And yet how close and clear the distance seems,

While all at hand is cloud--brightness of dreams

Unrealisable, yet seen so clear,

So only just beyond the dark. They wait,

Scarce knowing what they wait for, half in fear;

Expectance draws the curtain from their fate.

VII.

The silence of the storm weighs heavily

On their strained spirits: sometimes one will say

Some trivial thing as though to ward away

Mysterious powers, that imminently lie

In wait, with the strong exorcising grace

Of everyday's futility. Desire

Becomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,

Defined and hard:--If he could kiss her face,

Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her hand

Brushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?

Or is she pedestalled above the touch

Of his desire? He wonders: dare he seek

From her that little, that infinitely much?

And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek.

VIII. MOUNTAINS.

A stronger gust catches the cloud and twists

A spindle of rifted darkness through its heart,

A gash in the damp grey, which, thrust apart,

Reveals black depths a moment. Then the mists

Shut down again; a white uneasy sea

Heaves round the climbers and beneath their feet.

He strains on upwards through the wind and sleet,

Poised, or swift moving, or laboriously

Lifting his weight. And if he should let go,

What would he find down there, down there below

The curtain of the mist? What would he find

Beyond the dim and stifling now and here,

Beneath the unsettled turmoil of his mind?

Oh, there were nameless depths: he shrank with fear.

IX.

The hills more glorious in their coat of snow

Rise all around him, in the valleys run

Bright streams, and there are lakes that catch the sun,

And sunlit fields of emerald far below

That seem alive with inward light. In smoke

The far horizons fade; and there is peace

On everything, a sense of blessed release

From wilful strife. Like some prophetic cloak

The spirit of the mountains has descended

On all the world, and its unrest is ended.

Even the sea, glimpsed far away, seems still,

Hushed to a silver peace its storm and strife.

Mountains of vision, calm above fate and will,

You hold the promise of the freer life.

X. IN THE LITTLE ROOM.

London unfurls its incense-coloured dusk

Before the panes, rich but a while ago

With the charred gold and the red ember-glow

Of dying sunset. Houses quit the husk

Of secrecy, which, through the day, returns

A blank to all enquiry: but at nights

The cheerfulness of fire and lamp invites

The darkness inward, curious of what burns

With such a coloured life when all is dead--

The daylight world outside, with overhead

White clouds, and where we walk, the blaze

Of wet and sunlit streets, shops and the stream

Of glittering traffic--all that the nights erase,

Colour and speed, surviving but in dream.

XI.

Outside the dusk, but in the little room

All is alive with light, which brightly glints

On curving cup or the stiff folds of chintz,

Evoking its own whiteness. Shadows loom,

Bulging and black, upon the walls, where hang

Rich coloured plates of beauties that appeal

Less to the sense of sight than to the feel,

So moistly satin are their breasts. A pang,

Almost of pain, runs through him when he sees

Hanging, a homeless marvel, next to these,

The silken breastplate of a mandarin,

Centuries dead, which he had given her.

Exquisite miracle, when men could spin

Jay's wing and belly of the kingfisher!

XII.

In silence and as though expectantly

She crouches at his feet, while he caresses

His light-drawn fingers with the touch of tresses

Sleeked round her head, close-banded lustrously,

Save where at nape and temple the smooth brown

Sleaves out into a pale transparent mist

Of hair and tangled light. So to exist,

Poised 'twixt the deep of thought where spirits drown

Life in a void impalpable nothingness,

And, on the other side, the pain and stress

Of clamorous action and the gnawing fire

Of will, focal upon a point of earth--even thus

To sit, eternally without desire

And yet self-known, were happiness for us.

XIII.

She turns her head and in a flash of laughter

Looks up at him: and helplessly he feels

That life has circled with returning wheels

Back to a starting-point. Before and after

Merge in this instant, momently the same:

For it was thus she leaned and laughing turned

When, manifest, the spirit of beauty burned

In her young body with an inward flame,

And first he knew and loved her. In full tide

Life halts within him, suddenly stupefied.

Sight blackness, lightning-struck; but blindly tender

He draws her up to meet him, and she lies

Close folded by his arms in glad surrender,

Smiling, and with drooped head and half closed eyes.

XIV.

"I give you all; would that I might give more."

He sees the colour dawn across her cheeks

And die again to white; marks as she speaks

The trembling of her lips, as though she bore

Some sudden pain and hardly mastered it.

Within his arms he feels her shuddering,

Piteously trembling like some wild wood-thing

Caught unawares. Compassion infinite

Mounts up within him. Thus to hold and keep

And comfort her distressed, lull her to sleep

And gently kiss her brow and hair and eyes

Seems love perfected--templed high and white

Against the calm of golden autumn skies,

And shining quenchlessly with vestal light.

XV.

But passion ambushed by the aerial shrine

Comes forth to dance, a hoofed obscenity,

His satyr's dance, with laughter in his eye,

And cruelty along the scarlet line

Of his bright smiling mouth. All uncontrolled,

Love's rebel servant, he delights to beat

The maddening quick dry rhythm of goatish feet

Even in the sanctuary, and makes bold

To mime himself the godhead of the place.

He turns in terror from her trance-calmed face,

From the white-lidded languor of her eyes,

From lips that passion never shook before,

But glad in the promise of her sacrifice:

"I give you all; would that I might give more."

XVI.

He is afraid, seeing her lie so still,

So utterly his own; afraid lest she

Should open wide her eyes and let him see

The passionate conquest of her virgin will

Shine there in triumph, starry-bright with tears.

He thrusts her from him: face and hair and breast,

Hands he had touched, lips that his lips had pressed,

Seem things deadly to be desired. He fears

Lest she should body forth in palpable shame

Those dreams and longings that his blood, aflame

Through the hot dark of summer nights, had dreamed

And longed. Must all his love, then, turn to this?

Was lust the end of what so pure had seemed?

He must escape, ah God! her touch, her kiss.

XVII. IN THE PARK.

Laughing, "To-night," I said to him, "the Park

Has turned the garden of a symbolist.

Those old great trees that rise above the mist,

Gold with the light of evening, and the dark

Still water, where the dying sun evokes

An echoed glory--here I recognize

Those ancient gardens mirrored by the eyes

Of poets that hate the world of common folks,

Like you and me and that thin pious crowd,

Which yonder sings its hymns, so humbly proud

Of holiness. The garden of escape

Lies here; a small green world, and still the bride

Of quietness, although an imminent rape

Roars ceaselessly about on every side."

XVIII.

I had forgotten what I had lightly said,

And without speech, without a thought I went,

Steeped in that golden quiet, all content

To drink the transient beauty as it sped

Out of eternal darkness into time

To light and burn and know itself a fire;

Yet doomed--ah, fate of the fulfilled desire!--

To fade, a meteor, paying for the crime

Of living glorious in the denser air

Of our material earth. A strange despair,

An agony, yet strangely, subtly sweet

And tender as an unpassionate caress,

Filled me ... Oh laughter! youth's conceit

Grown almost conscious of youth's feebleness!

XIX.

He spoke abrupt across my dream: "Dear Garden,

A stranger to your magic peace, I stand

Beyond your walls, lost in a fevered land

Of stones and fire. Would that the gods would harden

My soul against its torment, or would blind

Those yearning glimpses of a life at rest

In perfect beauty--glimpses at the best

Through unpassed bars. And here, without, the wind

Of scattering passion blows: and women pass

Glitter-eyed down putrid alleys where the glass

Of some grimed window suddenly parades--

Ah, sickening heart-beat of desire!--the grace

Of bare and milk-warm flesh: the vision fades,

And at the pane shows a blind tortured face."

XX. SELF-TORMENT.

The days pass by, empty of thought and will:

His thought grows stagnant at its very springs,

With every channel on the world of things

Dammed up, and thus, by its long standing still,

Poisons itself and sickens to decay.

All his high love for her, his fair desire,

Loses its light; and a dull rancorous fire,

Burning darkness and bitterness that prey

Upon his heart are left. His spirit burns

Sometimes with hatred, or the hatred turns

To a fierce lust for her, more cruel than hate,

Till he is weary wrestling with its force:

And evermore she haunts him, early and late,

As pitilessly as an old remorse.

XXI.

Streets and the solitude of country places

Were once his friends. But as a man born blind,

Opening his eyes from lovely dreams, might find

The world a desert and men's larval faces

So hateful, he would wish to seek again

The darkness and his old chimeric sight

Of beauties inward--so, that fresh delight,

Vision of bright fields and angelic men,

That love which made him all the world, is gone.

Hating and hated now, he stands alone,

An island-point, measureless gulfs apart

From other lives, from the old happiness

Of being more than self, when heart to heart

Gave all, yet grew the greater, not the less.

XXII. THE QUARRY IN THE WOOD.

Swiftly deliberate, he seeks the place.

A small wind stirs, the copse is bright in the sun:

Like quicksilver the shine and shadow run

Across the leaves. A bramble whips his face,

The tears spring fast, and through the rainbow mist

He sees a world that wavers like the flame

Of a blown candle. Tears of pain and shame,

And lips that once had laughed and sung and kissed

Trembling in the passion of his sobbing breath!

The world a candle shuddering to its death,

And life a darkness, blind and utterly void

Of any love or goodness: all deceit,

This friendship and this God: all shams destroyed,

And truth seen now.

Earth fails beneath his feet.

SONG OF POPLARS

Shepherd, to yon tall poplars tune your flute:

Let them pierce, keenly, subtly shrill,

The slow blue rumour of the hill;

Let the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold,

And the great sky be mute.

Then hearken how the poplar trees unfold

Their buds, yet close and gummed and blind,

In airy leafage of the mind,

Rustling in silvery whispers the twin-hued scales

That fade not nor grow old.

"Poplars and fountains and you cypress spires

Springing in dark and rusty flame,

Seek you aught that hath a name?

Or say, say: Are you all an upward agony

Of undefined desires?

"Say, are you happy in the golden march

Of sunlight all across the day?

Or do you watch the uncertain way

That leads the withering moon on cloudy stairs

Over the heaven's wide arch?

"Is it towards sorrow or towards joy you lift

The sharpness of your trembling spears?

Or do you seek, through the grey tears

That blur the sky, in the heart of the triumphing blue,

A deeper, calmer rift?"

So; I have tuned my music to the trees,

And there were voices, dim below

Their shrillness, voices swelling slow

In the blue murmur of hills, and a golden cry

And then vast silences.

THE REEF

My green aquarium of phantom fish,

Goggling in on me through the misty panes;

My rotting leaves and fields spongy with rains;

My few clear quiet autumn days--I wish

I could leave all, clearness and mistiness;

Sodden or goldenly crystal, all too still.

Yes, and I too rot with the leaves that fill

The hollows in the woods; I am grown less

Than human, listless, aimless as the green

Idiot fishes of my aquarium,

Who loiter down their dim tunnels and come

And look at me and drift away, nought seen

Or understood, but only glazedly

Reflected. Upwards, upwards through the shadows,

Through the lush sponginess of deep-sea meadows

Where hare-lipped monsters batten, let me ply

Winged fins, bursting this matrix dark to find

Jewels and movement, mintage of sunlight

Scattered largely by the profuse wind,

And gulfs of blue brightness, too deep for sight.

Free, newly born, on roads of music and air

Speeding and singing, I shall seek the place

Where all the shining threads of water race,

Drawn in green ropes and foamy meshes. There,

On the red fretted ramparts of a tower

Of coral rooted in the depths, shall break

An endless sequence of joy and speed and power:

Green shall shatter to foam; flake with white flake

Shall create an instant's shining constellation

Upon the blue; and all the air shall be

Full of a million wings that swift and free

Laugh in the sun, all power and strong elation.

Yes, I shall seek that reef, which is beyond

All isles however magically sleeping

In tideless seas, uncharted and unconned

Save by blind eyes; beyond the laughter and weeping

That brood like a cloud over the lands of men.

Movement, passion of colour and pure wings,

Curving to cut like knives--these are the things

I search for:--passion beyond the ken

Of our foiled violences, and, more swift

Than any blow which man aims against time,

The invulnerable, motion that shall rift

All dimness with the lightning of a rhyme,

Or note, or colour. And the body shall be

Quick as the mind; and will shall find release

From bondage to brute things; and joyously

Soul, will and body, in the strength of triune peace,

Shall live the perfect grace of power unwasted.

And love consummate, marvellously blending

Passion and reverence in a single spring

Of quickening force, till now never yet tasted,

But ever ceaselessly thirsted for, shall crown

The new life with its ageless starry fire.

I go to seek that reef, far down, far down

Below the edge of everyday's desire,

Beyond the magical islands, where of old

I was content, dreaming, to give the lie

To misery. They were all strong and bold

That thither came; and shall I dare to try?

WINTER DREAM

Oh wind-swept towers,

Oh endlessly blossoming trees,

White clouds and lucid eyes,

And pools in the rocks whose unplumbed blue is pregnant

With who knows what of subtlety

And magical curves and limbs--

White Anadyomene and her shallow breasts

Mother-of-pearled with light.

And oh the April, April of straight soft hair,

Falling smooth as the mountain water and brown;

The April of little leaves unblinded,

Of rosy nipples and innocence

And the blue languor of weary eyelids.

Across a huge gulf I fling my voice

And my desires together:

Across a huge gulf ... on the other bank

Crouches April with her hair as smooth and straight and brown

As falling waters.

Oh brave curve upwards and outwards.

Oh despair of the downward tilting--

Despair still beautiful

As a great star one has watched all night

Wheeling down under the hills.

Silence widens and darkens;

Voice and desires have dropped out of sight.

I am all alone, dreaming she would come and kiss me.

THE FLOWERS

Day after day,

At spring's return,

I watch my flowers, how they burn

Their lives away.

The candle crocus

And daffodil gold

Drink fire of the sunshine--

Quickly cold.

And the proud tulip--

How red he glows!--

Is quenched ere summer

Can kindle the rose.

Purple as the innermost

Core of a sinking flame,

Deep in the leaves the violets smoulder

To the dust whence they came.

Day after day

At spring's return,

I watch my flowers, how they burn

Their lives away,

Day after day ...

THE ELMS

Fine as the dust of plumy fountains blowing

Across the lanterns of a revelling night,

The tiny leaves of April's earliest growing

Powder the trees--so vaporously light,

They seem to float, billows of emerald foam

Blown by the South on its bright airy tide,

Seeming less trees than things beatified,

Come from the world of thought which was their home.

For a while only. Rooted strong and fast,

Soon will they lift towards the summer sky

Their mountain-mass of clotted greenery.

Their immaterial season quickly past,

They grow opaque, and therefore needs must die,

Since every earth to earth returns at last.

OUT OF THE WINDOW

In the middle of countries, far from hills and sea,

Are the little places one passes by in trains

And never stops at; where the skies extend

Uninterrupted, and the level plains

Stretch green and yellow and green without an end.

And behind the glass of their Grand Express

Folk yawn away a province through,

With nothing to think of, nothing to do,

Nothing even to look at--never a "view"

In this damned wilderness.

But I look out of the window and find

Much to satisfy the mind.

Mark how the furrows, formed and wheeled

In a motion orderly and staid,

Sweep, as we pass, across the field

Like a drilled army on parade.

And here's a market-garden, barred

With stripe on stripe of varied greens ...

Bright potatoes, flower starred,

And the opacous colour of beans.

Each line deliberately swings

Towards me, till I see a straight

Green avenue to the heart of things,

The glimpse of a sudden opened gate

Piercing the adverse walls of fate ...

A moment only, and then, fast, fast,

The gate swings to, the avenue closes;

Fate laughs, and once more interposes

Its barriers.

The train has passed.

INSPIRATION

Noonday upon the Alpine meadows

Pours its avalanche of Light

And blazing flowers: the very shadows

Translucent are and bright.

It seems a glory that nought surpasses--

Passion of angels in form and hue--

When, lo! from the jewelled heaven of the grasses

Leaps a lightning of sudden blue.

Dimming the sun-drunk petals,

Bright even unto pain,

The grasshopper flashes, settles,

And then is quenched again.

SUMMER STILLNESS

The stars are golden instants in the deep

Flawless expanse of night: the moon is set:

The river sleeps, entranced, a smooth cool sleep

Seeming so motionless that I forget

The hollow booming bridges, where it slides,

Dark with the sad looks that it bears along,

Towards a sea whose unreturning tides

Ravish the sighted ships and the sailors' song.

ANNIVERSARIES

Once more the windless days are here,

Quiet of autumn, when the year

Halts and looks backward and draws breath

Before it plunges into death.

Silver of mist and gossamers,

Through-shine of noonday's glassy gold,

Pale blue of skies, where nothing stirs

Save one blanched leaf, weary and old,

That over and over slowly falls

From the mute elm-trees, hanging on air

Like tattered flags along the walls

Of chapels deep in sunlit prayer.

Once more ... Within its flawless glass

To-day reflects that other day,

When, under the bracken, on the grass,

We who were lovers happily lay

And hardly spoke, or framed a thought

That was not one with the calm hills

And crystal sky. Ourselves were nought,

Our gusty passions, our burning wills

Dissolved in boundlessness, and we

Were almost bodiless, almost free.

The wind has shattered silver and gold.

Night after night of sparkling cold,

Orion lifts his tangled feet

From where the tossing branches beat

In a fine surf against the sky.

So the trance ended, and we grew

Restless, we knew not how or why;

And there were sudden gusts that blew

Our dreaming banners into storm;

We wore the uncertain crumbling form

Of a brown swirl of windy leaves,

A phantom shape that stirs and heaves

Shuddering from earth, to fall again

With a dry whisper of withered rain.

Last, from the dead and shrunken days

We conjured spring, lighting the blaze

Of burnished tulips in the dark;

And from black frost we struck a spark

Of blue delight and fragrance new,

A little world of flowers and dew.

Winter for us was over and done:

The drought of fluttering leaves had grown

Emerald shining in the sun,

As light as glass, as firm as stone.

Real once more: for we had passed

Through passion into thought again;

Shaped our desires and made that fast

Which was before a cloudy pain;

Moulded the dimness, fixed, defined

In a fair statue, strong and free,

Twin bodies flaming into mind,

Poised on the brink of ecstasy.

ITALY

There is a country in my mind,

Lovelier than a poet blind

Could dream of, who had never known

This world of drought and dust and stone

In all its ugliness: a place

Full of an all but human grace;

Whose dells retain the printed form

Of heavenly sleep, and seem yet warm

From some pure body newly risen;

Where matter is no more a prison,

But freedom for the soul to know

Its native beauty. For things glow

There with an inward truth and are

All fire and colour like a star.

And in that land are domes and towers

That hang as light and bright as flowers

Upon the sky, and seem a birth

Rather of air than solid earth.

Sometimes I dream that walking there

In the green shade, all unaware

At a new turn of the golden glade,

I shall see her, and as though afraid

Shall halt a moment and almost fall

For passing faintness, like a man

Who feels the sudden spirit of Pan

Brimming his narrow soul with all

The illimitable world. And she,

Turning her head, will let me see

The first sharp dawn of her surprise

Turning to welcome in her eyes.

And I shall come and take my lover

And looking on her re-discover

All her beauty:--her dark hair

And the little ears beneath it, where

Roses of lucid shadow sleep;

Her brooding mouth, and in the deep

Wells of her eyes reflected stars ...

Oh, the imperishable things

That hands and lips as well as words

Shall speak! Oh movement of white wings,

Oh wheeling galaxies of birds ...!

THE ALIEN

A petal drifted loose

From a great magnolia bloom,

Your face hung in the gloom,

Floating, white and close.

We seemed alone: but another

Bent o'er you with lips of flame,

Unknown, without a name,

Hated, and yet my brother.

Your one short moan of pain

Was an exorcising spell:

The devil flew back to hell;

We were alone again.

A LITTLE MEMORY

White in the moonlight,

Wet with dew,

We have known the languor

Of being two.

We have been weary

As children are,

When over them, radiant,

A stooping star,

Bends their Good-Night,

Kissed and smiled:--

Each was mother,

Each was child.

Child, from your forehead

I kissed the hair,

Gently, ah, gently:

And you were

Mistress and mother

When on your breast

I lay so safely

And could rest.

WAKING

Darkness had stretched its colour,

Deep blue across the pane:

No cloud to make night duller,

No moon with its tarnish stain;

But only here and there a star,

One sharp point of frosty fire,

Hanging infinitely far

In mockery of our life and death

And all our small desire.

Now in this hour of waking

From under brows of stone,

A new pale day is breaking

And the deep night is gone.

Sordid now, and mean and small

The daylight world is seen again,

With only the veils of mist that fall

Deaf and muffling over all

To hide its ugliness and pain.

But to-day this dawn of meanness

Shines in my eyes, as when

The new world's brightness and cleanness

Broke on the first of men.

For the light that shows the huddled things

Of this close-pressing earth,

Shines also on your face and brings

All its dear beauty back to me

In a new miracle of birth.

I see you asleep and unpassioned,

White-faced in the dusk of your hair--

Your beauty so fleetingly fashioned

That it filled me once with despair

To look on its exquisite transience

And think that our love and thought and laughter

Puff out with the death of our flickering sense,

While we pass ever on and away

Towards some blank hereafter.

But now I am happy, knowing

That swift time is our friend,

And that our love's passionate glowing,

Though it turn ash in the end,

Is a rose of fire that must blossom its way

Through temporal stuff, nor else could be

More than a nothing. Into day

The boundless spaces of night contract

And in your opening eyes I see

Night born in day, in time eternity.

BY THE FIRE

We who are lovers sit by the fire,

Cradled warm 'twixt thought and will,

Sit and drowse like sleeping dogs

In the equipoise of all desire,

Sit and listen to the still

Small hiss and whisper of green logs

That burn away, that burn away

With the sound of a far-off falling stream

Of threaded water blown to steam,

Grey ghost in the mountain world of grey.

Vapours blue as distance rise

Between the hissing logs that show

A glimpse of rosy heat below;

And candles watch with tireless eyes

While we sit drowsing here. I know,

Dimly, that there exists a world,

That there is time perhaps, and space

Other and wider than this place,

Where at the fireside drowsily curled

We hear the whisper and watch the flame

Burn blinkless and inscrutable.

And then I know those other names

That through my brain from cell to cell

Echo--reverberated shout

Of waiters mournful along corridors:

But nobody carries the orders out,

And the names (dear friends, your name and yours)

Evoke no sign. But here I sit

On the wide hearth, and there are you:

That is enough and only true.

The world and the friends that lived in it

Are shadows: you alone remain

Real in this drowsing room,

Full of the whispers of distant rain

And candles staring into the gloom.

VALEDICTORY

I had remarked--how sharply one observes

When life is disappearing round the curves

Of yet another corner, out of sight!--

I had remarked when it was "good luck" and "good night"

And "a good journey to you," on her face

Certain enigmas penned in the hieroglyphs

Of that half frown and queer fixed smile and trace

Of clouded thought in those brown eyes,

Always so happily clear of hows and ifs--

My poor bleared mind!--and haunting whys.

There I stood, holding her farewell hand,

(Pressing my life and soul and all

The world to one good-bye, till, small

And smaller pressed, why there I'd stand

Dead when they vanished with the sight of her).

And I saw that she had grown aware,

Queer puzzled face! of other things

Beyond the present and her own young speed,

Of yesterday and what new days might breed

Monstrously when the future brings

A charger with your late-lamented head:

Aware of other people's lives and will,

Aware, perhaps, aware even of me ...

The joyous hope of it! But still

I pitied her; for it was sad to see

A goddess shorn of her divinity.

In the midst of her speed she had made pause,

And doubts with all their threat of claws,

Outstripped till now by her unconsciousness,

Had seized on her; she was proved mortal now.

"Live, only live! For you were meant

Never to know a thought's distress,

But a long glad astonishment

At the world's beauty and your own.

The pity of you, goddess, grown

Perplexed and mortal."

Yet ... yet ... can it be

That she is aware, perhaps, even of me?

And life recedes, recedes; the curve is bare,

My handkerchief flutters blankly in the air;

And the question rumbles in the void:

Was she aware, was she after all aware?

LOVE SONG

Dear absurd child--too dear to my cost I've found--

God made your soul for pleasure, not for use:

It cleaves no way, but angled broad obtuse,

Impinges with a slabby-bellied sound

Full upon life, and on the rind of things

Rubs its sleek self and utters purr and snore

And all the gamut of satisfied murmurings,

Content with that, nor wishes anything more.

A happy infant, daubed to the eyes in juice

Of peaches that flush bloody at the core,

Naked you bask upon a south-sea shore,

While o'er your tumbling bosom the hair floats loose.

The wild flowers bloom and die; the heavens go round

With the song of wheeling planetary rings:

You wriggle in the sun; each moment brings

Its freight for you; in all things pleasures abound.

You taste and smile, then this for the next pass over;

And there's no future for you and no past,

And when, absurdly, death arrives at last,

'Twill please you awhile to kiss your latest lover.

PRIVATE PROPERTY

All fly--yet who is misanthrope?--

The actual men and things that pass

Jostling, to wither as the grass

So soon: and (be it heaven's hope,

Or poetry's kaleidoscope,

Or love or wine, at feast, at mass)

Each owns a paradise of glass

Where never a yearning heliotrope

Pursues the sun's ascent or slope;

For the sun dreams there, and no time is or was.

Like fauns embossed in our domain,

We look abroad, and our calm eyes

Mark how the goatish gods of pain

Revel; and if by grim surprise

They break into our paradise,

Patient we build its beauty up again.

REVELATION

At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx,

I taste a strange apocalypse:

Your subtle taper finger-tips

Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks,

I know the wiles and each iynx

That brought me passionate to your lips:

I know you bare as laughter strips

Your charnel beauty; yet my spirit drinks

Pure knowledge from this tainted well,

And now hears voices yet unheard

Within it, and without it sees

That world of which the poets tell

Their vision in the stammered word

Of those that wake from piercing ecstasies.

MINOAN PORCELAIN

Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze

All imperturbable do not

Even make pretences to regard

The justing absence of her stays,

Where many a Tyrian gallipot

Excites desire with spilth of nard.

The bistred rims above the fard

Of cheeks as red as bergamot

Attest that no shamefaced delays

Will clog fulfilment, nor retard

Full payment of the Cyprian's praise

Down to the last remorseful jot.

Hail priestess of we know not what

Strange cult of Mycenean days!

THE DECAMERON

Noon with a depth of shadow beneath the trees

Shakes in the heat, quivers to the sound of lutes:

Half shaded, half sunlit, a great bowl of fruits

Glistens purple and golden: the flasks of wine

Cool in their panniers of snow: silks muffle and shine:

Dim velvet, where through the leaves a sunbeam shoots,

Rifts in a pane of scarlet: fingers tapping the roots

Keep languid time to the music's soft slow decline.

Suddenly from the gate rises up a cry,

Hideous broken laughter, scarce human in sound;

Gaunt clawed hands, thrust through the bars despairingly,

Clutch fast at the scented air, while on the ground

Lie the poor plague-stricken carrions, who have found

Strength to crawl forth and curse the sunshine and die.

IN UNCERTAINTY TO A LADY

I am not one of those who sip,

Like a quotidian bock,

Cheap idylls from a languid lip

Prepared to yawn or mock.

I wait the indubitable word,

The great Unconscious Cue.

Has it been spoken and unheard?

Spoken, perhaps, by you ...?

CRAPULOUS IMPRESSION

(To J.S.)

Still life, still life ... the high-lights shine

Hard and sharp on the bottles: the wine

Stands firmly solid in the glasses,

Smooth yellow ice, through which there passes

The lamp's bright pencil of down-struck light.

The fruits metallically gleam,

Globey in their heaped-up bowl,

And there are faces against the night

Of the outer room--faces that seem

Part of this still, still life ... they've lost their soul.

And amongst these frozen faces you smiled,

Surprised, surprisingly, like a child:

And out of the frozen welter of sound

Your voice came quietly, quietly.

"What about God?" you said. "I have found

Much to be said for Totality.

All, I take it, is God: God's all--

This bottle, for instance ..." I recall,

Dimly, that you took God by the neck--

God-in-the-bottle--and pushed Him across:

But I, without a moment's loss

Moved God-in-the-salt in front and shouted: "Check!"

THE LIFE THEORETIC

While I have been fumbling over books

And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

Other young men have been battling with the days

And others have been kissing the beautiful women.

They have brazen faces like battering-rams.

But I who think about books and such--

I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,

And the women palsy me with fear.

But when it comes to fumbling over books

And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

Why, there I am.

But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it,

Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows.

COMPLAINT OF A POET MANQUÉ

We judge by appearance merely:

If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly.

So I grew the hair so long on my head

That my mother wouldn't know me,

Till a woman in a night-club said,

As I was passing by,

"Hullo, here comes Salome ..."

I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass,

And, oh Salome; there I was--

Positively jewelled, half a vampire,

With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily

Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire

Over the brink of the crag of sense,

Looking down from perilous eminence

Into a gulf of windy night.

And there's straw in my tempestuous hair,

And I'm not a poet: but never despair!

I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.

SOCIAL AMENITIES

I am getting on well with this anecdote,

When suddenly I recall

The many times I have told it of old,

And all the worked-up phrases, and the dying fall

Of voice, well timed in the crisis, the note

Of mock-heroic ingeniously struck--

The whole thing sticks in my throat,

And my face all tingles and pricks with shame

For myself and my hearers.

These are the social pleasures, my God!

But I finish the story triumphantly all the same.

TOPIARY

Failing sometimes to understand

Why there are folk whose flesh should seem

Like carrion puffed with noisome steam,

Fly-blown to the eye that looks on it,

Fly-blown to the touch of a hand;

Why there are men without any legs,

Whizzing along on little trollies

With long long arms like apes':

Failing to see why God the Topiarist

Should train and carve and twist

Men's bodies into such fantastic shapes:

Yes, failing to see the point of it all, I sometimes wish

That I were a fabulous thing in a fool's mind,

Or, at the ocean bottom, in a world that is deaf and blind,

Very remote and happy, a great goggling fish.

ON THE BUS

Sitting on the top of the 'bus,

I bite my pipe and look at the sky.

Over my shoulder the smoke streams out

And my life with it.

"Conservation of energy," you say.

But I burn, I tell you, I burn;

And the smoke of me streams out

In a vanishing skein of grey.

Crash and bump ... my poor bruised body!

I am a harp of twittering strings,

An elegant instrument, but infinitely second-hand,

And if I have not got phthisis it is only an accident.

Droll phenomena!

POINTS AND LINES

Instants in the quiet, small sharp stars,

Pierce my spirit with a thrust whose speed

Baffles even the grasp of time.

Oh that I might reflect them

As swiftly, as keenly as they shine.

But I am a pool of waters, summer-still,

And the stars are mirrored across me;

Those stabbing points of the sky

Turned to a thread of shaken silver,

A long fine thread.

PANIC

The eyes of the portraits on the wall

Look at me, follow me,

Stare incessantly:

I take it their glance means nothing at all?

--Clearly, oh clearly! Nothing at all ...

Out in the gardens by the lake

The sleeping peacocks suddenly wake;

Out in the gardens, moonlit and forlorn,

Each of them sounds his mournful horn:

Shrill peals that waver and crack and break.

What can have made the peacocks wake?

RETURN FROM BUSINESS

Evenings in trains,

When the little black twittering ghosts

Along the brims of cuttings,

Against the luminous sky,

Interrupt with their hurrying rumour every thought

Save that one is young and setting,

Headlong westering,

And there is no recapture.

STANZAS

Thought is an unseen net wherein our mind

Is taken and vainly struggles to be free:

Words, that should loose our spirit, do but bind

New fetters on our hoped-for liberty:

And action bears us onward like a stream

Past fabulous shores, scarce seen in our swift course;

Glorious--and yet its headlong currents seem

Backwaters of some nobler purer force.

There are slow curves, more subtle far than thought,

That stoop to carry the grace of a girl's breast;

And hanging flowers, so exquisitely wrought

In airy metal, that they seem possessed

Of souls; and there are distant hills that lift

The shoulder of a goddess towards the light;

And arrowy trees, sudden and sharp and swift,

Piercing the spirit deeply with delight.

Would I might make these miracles my own!

Like a pure angel, thinking colour and form,

Hardening to rage in a flame of chiselled stone,

Spilling my love like sunlight, golden and warm

On noonday flowers, speaking the song of birds

Among the branches, whispering the fall of rain,

Beyond all thought, past action and past words,

I would live in beauty, free from self and pain.

POEM

Books and a coloured skein of thoughts were mine;

And magic words lay ripening in my soul

Till their much-whispered music turned a wine

Whose subtlest power was all in my control.

These things were mine, and they were real for me

As lips and darling eyes and a warm breast:

For I could love a phrase, a melody,

Like a fair woman, worshipped and possessed.

I scorned all fire that outward of the eyes

Could kindle passion; scorned, yet was afraid;

Feared, and yet envied those more deeply wise

Who saw the bright earth beckon and obeyed.

But a time came when, turning full of hate

And weariness from my remembered themes,

I wished my poet's pipe could modulate

Beauty more palpable than words and dreams.

All loveliness with which an act informs

The dim uncertain chaos of desire

Is mine to-day; it touches me, it warms

Body and spirit with its outward fire.

I am mine no more: I have become a part

Of that great earth that draws a breath and stirs

To meet the spring. But I could wish my heart

Were still a winter of frosty gossamers.

SCENES OF THE MIND

I have run where festival was loud

With drum and brass among the crowd

Of panic revellers, whose cries

Affront the quiet of the skies;

Whose dancing lights contract the deep

Infinity of night and sleep

To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire.

And I have found my heart's desire

In beechen caverns that autumn fills

With the blue shadowiness of distant hills;

Whose luminous grey pillars bear

The stooping sky: calm is the air,

Nor any sound is heard to mar

That crystal silence--as from far,

Far off a man may see

The busy world all utterly

Hushed as an old memorial scene.

Long evenings I have sat and been

Strangely content, while in my hands

I held a wealth of coloured strands,

Shimmering plaits of silk and skeins

Of soft bright wool. Each colour drains

New life at the lamp's round pool of gold;

Each sinks again when I withhold

The quickening radiance, to a wan

And shadowy oblivion

Of what it was. And in my mind

Beauty or sudden love has shined

And wakened colour in what was dead

And turned to gold the sullen lead

Of mean desires and everyday's

Poor thoughts and customary ways.

Sometimes in lands where mountains throw

Their silent spell on all below,

Drawing a magic circle wide

About their feet on every side,

Robbed of all speech and thought and act,

I have seen God in the cataract.

In falling water and in flame,

Never at rest, yet still the same,

God shows himself. And I have known

The swift fire frozen into stone,

And water frozen changelessly

Into the death of gems. And I

Long sitting by the thunderous mill

Have seen the headlong wheel made still,

And in the silence that ensued

Have known the endless solitude

Of being dead and utterly nought.

Inhabitant of mine own thought,

I look abroad, and all I see

Is my creation, made for me:

Along my thread of life are pearled

The moments that make up the world.

L'APRÈS-MIDI D'UN FAUNE

(From the French of Stéphane Mallarmé.)

I would immortalize these nymphs: so bright

Their sunlit colouring, so airy light,

It floats like drowsing down. Loved I a dream?

My doubts, born of oblivious darkness, seem

A subtle tracery of branches grown

The tree's true self--proving that I have known

No triumph, but the shadow of a rose.

But think. These nymphs, their loveliness ... suppose

They bodied forth your senses' fabulous thirst?

Illusion! which the blue eyes of the first,

As cold and chaste as is the weeping spring,

Beget: the other, sighing, passioning,

Is she the wind, warm in your fleece at noon?

No, through this quiet, when a weary swoon

Crushes and chokes the latest faint essay

Of morning, cool against the encroaching day,

There is no murmuring water, save the gush

Of my clear fluted notes; and in the hush

Blows never a wind, save that which through my reed

Puffs out before the rain of notes can speed

Upon the air, with that calm breath of art

That mounts the unwrinkled zenith visibly,

Where inspiration seeks its native sky.

You fringes of a calm Sicilian lake,

The sun's own mirror which I love to take,

Silent beneath your starry flowers, tell

_How here I cut the hollow rushes, well

Tamed by my skill, when on the glaucous gold

Of distant lawns about their fountain cold

A living whiteness stirs like a lazy wave;

And at the first slow notes my panpipes gave

These flocking swans, these naiads, rather, fly

Or dive._ Noon burns inert and tawny dry,

Nor marks how clean that Hymen slipped away

From me who seek in song the real A.

Wake, then, to the first ardour and the sight,

O lonely faun, of the old fierce white light,

With, lilies, one of you for innocence.

Other than their lips' delicate pretence,

The light caress that quiets treacherous lovers,

My breast, I know not how to tell, discovers

The bitten print of some immortal's kiss.

But hush! a mystery so great as this

I dare not tell, save to my double reed,

Which, sharer of my every joy and need,

Dreams down its cadenced monologues that we

Falsely confuse the beauties that we see

With the bright palpable shapes our song creates:

My flute, as loud as passion modulates,

Purges the common dream of flank and breast,

Seen through closed eyes and inwardly caressed,

Of every empty and monotonous line.

Bloom then, O Syrinx, in thy flight malign,

A reed once more beside our trysting-lake.

Proud of my music, let me often make

A song of goddesses and see their rape

Profanely done on many a painted shape.

So when the grape's transparent juice I drain,

I quell regret for pleasures past and feign

A new real grape. For holding towards the sky

The empty skin, I blow it tight and lie

Dream-drunk till evening, eyeing it.

Tell o'er

Remembered joys and plump the grape once more.

_Between the reeds I saw their bodies gleam

Who cool no mortal fever in the stream

Crying to the woods the rage of their desire:

And their bright hair went down in jewelled fire

Where crystal broke and dazzled shudderingly.

I check my swift pursuit: for see where lie,

Bruised, being twins in love, by languor sweet,

Two sleeping girls, clasped at my very feet.

I seize and run with them, nor part the pair,

Breaking this covert of frail petals, where

Roses drink scent of the sun and our light play

'Mid tumbled flowers shall match the death of day._

I love that virginal fury--ah, the wild

Thrill when a maiden body shrinks, defiled,

Shuddering like arctic light, from lips that sear

Its nakedness ... the flesh in secret fear!

Contagiously through my linked pair it flies

Where innocence in either, struggling, dies,

Wet with fond tears or some less piteous dew.

_Gay in the conquest of these fears, I grew

So rash that I must needs the sheaf divide

Of ruffled kisses heaven itself had tied.

For as I leaned to stifle in the hair

Of one my passionate laughter (taking care

With a stretched finger, that her innocence

Might stain with her companion's kindling sense

To touch the younger little one, who lay

Child-like unblushing) my ungrateful prey

Slips from me, freed by passion's sudden death,

Nor heeds the frenzy of my sobbing breath._

Let it pass! others of their hair shall twist

A rope to drag me to those joys I missed.

See how the ripe pomegranates bursting red

To quench the thirst of the mumbling bees have bled;

So too our blood, kindled by some chance fire,

Flows for the swarming legions of desire.

At evening, when the woodland green turns gold

And ashen grey, 'mid the quenched leaves, behold!

Red Etna glows, by Venus visited,

Walking the lava with her snowy tread

Whene'er the flames in thunderous slumber die.

I hold the goddess!

Ah, sure penalty!

But the unthinking soul and body swoon

At last beneath the heavy hush of noon.

Forgetful let me lie where summer's drouth

Sifts fine the sand and then with gaping mouth

Dream planet-struck by the grape's round wine-red star.

Nymphs, I shall see the shade that now you are.

THE LOUSE-HUNTERS

(From the French of Rimbaud).

When the child's forehead, full of torments red,

Cries out for sleep and its pale host of dreams,

His two big sisters come unto his bed,

Having long fingers, tipped with silvery gleams.

They set him at a casement, open wide

On seas of flowers that stir in the blue airs,

And through his curls, all wet with dew, they slide

Those terrible searching finger-tips of theirs.

He hears them breathing, softly, fearfully,

Honey-sweet ruminations, slow respired:

Then a sharp hiss breaks time and melody--

Spittle indrawn, old kisses new-desired.

Down through the perfumed silences he hears

Their eyelids fluttering: long fingers thrill,

Probing a lassitude bedimmed with tears,

While the nails crunch at every louse they kill.

He is drunk with Languor--soft accordion-sigh,

Delirious wine of Love in Idleness;

Longings for tears come welling up and die,

As slow or swift he feels their magical caress.