II
SEAS are roaring like a lion; with their
wavy flocks Zion,
Noses like a scimitar,
Hair a brassy bar
Come
To
The sun’s drum; through
Light green waters swim their daughters, lashing
with their eel-sleek-locks
The furred
Heads
Of mermaids that occurred,
Sinking to their cheap beds.
Blurred
Legs, like trunks of tropical
Plants, rise up and, over all,
Green as a conservatory,
Is the light ... another story....
It has grown too late for life:
Put on your gloves and take a drive!
SMALL TALK
I
UPON the noon Cassandra died
The harpy preened itself outside.
Bank Holiday put forth its glamour,
And in the wayside station’s clamour
We found the café at the rear,
And sat and drank our Pilsener beer.
Words smeared upon our wooden faces
Now paint them into queer grimaces;
The crackling greeneries that spirt
Like fireworks, mock our souls inert,
And we seem feathered like a bird
Among those shadows scarcely heard.
Beneath her shade-ribbed switchback mane
The harpy, breasted like a train,
Was haggling with a farmer’s wife:
“Fresh harpy’s eggs, no trace of life.”
Miss Sitwell, cross and white as chalk,
Was indisposed for the small talk.
Since, peering through a shadowed door,
She saw Cassandra on the floor.
SMALL TALK
II
UPON the noon
Cassandra died,
Harpy soon
Screeched outside.
Gardener Jupp,
In his shed,
Counted wooden
Carrots red.
Black shades pass,
Dead-stiff there,
On green baize grass—
Drink his beer.
Bumpkin turnip,
Mask limp-locked,
White sun frights
The gardener shocked.
Harpy creaked
Her limbs again:
“I think, she squeaked,
It’s going to rain!”
DANSONS LA GIGUE
DANCE the jig, whirl
In the street, girl.
Rush up and down,
Houses, to town—
On the see-saw
Made out of raw
Hot yellow rays,
Crude edges of days.
Dance the jig, whirl—
Like your blond curl!
Oh! it is fine to-day,
On this Bank Holiday!
Sound of young feet
Comes down the street ...
Never again
Pleasure or pain....
Dance the jig, whirl
In the street, girl.
Do the dead ache
In summer, to slake
Their thirst of love?—Hush,—
No tears to gush,
My soul is of mud,
Cannot weep blood....
. . . .
Dance the jig, dance the jig,—
Dance the jig, girl.
MESSALINA AT MARGATE
THE tents are coloured like a child’s balloons;
They swell upon the air like August moons
Anchored by waters paler than a pearl;
The airs like rain-wet shrinking petals curl
Beneath the rainbow lights of noon that fill
The open calyx with the faintest thrill,
Then break in airy bubbles on the sense
Like sounds upheld in exquisite suspense.
In grande toilette, and with a parasol
Bright-fringèd as the noonday sun, (that fool
Of beauty,) Messalina promenades.
A crinoline keeps off the other shades:
Her grape-black hair casts shadows deep as death;
All curled and high, yet stirring at Time’s breath.
The powder on her face is shuddering white
As dust of æons seen in heaven’s light.
She leaves the sands, where in tents striped like fruits
The dancers whirl like winds to airy flutes,
And music, soother than the pulp of pearls
Whose sweetness decks the swan-white syren girls,
In air-pale waves like water, has the sheen
Of mirrors, floats like flower-wing’d stars.—O spleen!
Leave Regent’s Park and quit society
Only to find this immorality!
So now she goes to church, where bonnets steam
Like incense, and the painted windows seem
Naught but a coloured veil stupidity
Had wrought to clothe her dumb soliloquy:
“There’s comfort in old age: the steam of food
Ascending like the rich man’s soul to God;
And little words that crackle as they went,
How such and such a life was evil spent,
“Until they make a fire to warm our hands.
For Time has wrapp’d the heart in swaddling bands,
But yet they could not save it from the cold.—
The soul’s a pander grown; for she has sold
“My body to the Church; does nicely now.
Oh! Soul has much to learn from flesh, I vow.”
Thus Messalina, grown both old and fat,—
The Church’s parrot now, and dull at that!
PEDAGOGUES
THE air is like a jarring bell
That jangles words it cannot spell,
And black as Fate, the iron trees
Stretch thirstily to catch the breeze.
The fat leaves pat the shrinking air;
The hot sun’s patronising stare
Rouses the stout flies from content
To some small show of sentiment.
Beneath the terrace shines the green
Metallic strip of sea, and sheen
Of sands, where folk flaunt parrot-bright
With rags and tags of noisy light.
The brass band’s snorting stabs the sky
And tears the yielding vacancy—
The imbecile and smiling blue
Until fresh meaning trickles through;
And slowly we perambulate
With spectacles that concentrate,
In one short hour, Eternity,
In one small lens, Infinity.
With children, our primeval curse,
We overrun the universe—
Beneath the giddy lights of noon,
White as a tired August moon.
The air is like a jarring bell
That jangles words it cannot spell,
And black as Fate, the iron trees
Stretch thirstily to catch the breeze.
SONG FROM “THE QUEEN OF PALMYRA”
AND shall we never find those diamonds bright
That were the fawn-queen of Palmyra’s eyes?—
Ah, dark hot jewels lie hidden from the sight
Beneath dark palm-trees where the river sighs
Beyond the tomb of young eternities;
And in the desert, lonely flowers weep—
The clouds have such long hair—that tangles Sleep.
THE CHOIR-BOY RIDES ON THE SWITCHBACK
IN the fruit-ripe heat of afternoon
Each muslined school-child seems a moon;
And in the tents, those lazy waves
From out the echoing coral caves
Of light, like Venus from the sea
The clown seems, blond hair floating free.
The switchback, with its noisy run,
Is turning like the wooden sun
As he rides on his rocking-horse
All Struwwelpeter-haired; we course
On sands as moist as sugar-cane,
And the Fat Woman’s face and mane
Are sometimes dappled by the shade
Into the likeness of some maid
Long dead ... those golden shadows fell
On Cressid or Alaciel.
The beggar-tunes on horseback ride,
With cheeks as pink as Angels’,—glide
Through Babylon, Chicago, Troy,
And Black Man’s Land. Each golden boy
Blows silver trumpets over these,
As clear as apples on the trees.
I will go home and pack my pride,
Then with these beggar-tunes I’ll ride—
For all the hymns I try to sing
Are but Love’s beggars shivering
In thorny thickets where one sees
Stars grow for wild wet raspberries.
APRICOT JAM
BENEATH the dancing, glancing green
The tea is spread amid the sheen
Of pince-nez (glints of thought); thus seen,
In sharp reflections only, brain
Perceives the world all flat and plain
In rounded segments, joy and pain.
The parasols dance like the sun,
Cast wavering nets of shade that run
Across the chattering table’s fun,
The laughing faces, and across
Half-shadowed faces looking cross,
And black hair with a bird-bright gloss.
The flashing children stayed and checked,
Smooth india-rubber leaves reflect
Their parrot-green on circumspect
Glazed china, where the negroid tea
Reflects the world’s obscurity
In high lights such as pince-nez see.
And all the sheen of shadows feather
Muslin frocks like plumes; together,
In the hot and flashing weather,
Bird-high voices shrill and chatter
With the high and glinting clatter
Tea-cups make, and whispered patter—
(Listen, and you’ll get a slap!)
Worlds are small as any map,
And life will come our way—mayhap.
STOPPING PLACE
THE world grows furry, grunts with sleep ...
But I must on the surface keep.
The jolting of the train to me
Seems some primeval vertebræ
Attached by life-nerves to my brain—
Reactionary once again.
So that I see shapes crude and new
And ordered,—with some end in view,
No longer with the horny eyes
Of other people’s memories.
Through highly varnished yellow heat,
As through a lens that does not fit,
The faces jolt in cubes, and I
Perceive their odd solidity
And lack of meaning absolute:
For why should noses thus protrude,
And to what purpose can relate
Each hair so oddly separate?
Anchored against the puff of breeze,
As shallow as the crude blue seas,
The coloured blocks and cubes of faces
Seem Noah’s arks that shelter races
Of far absurdities to breed
Their queer kind after we are dead.
Blue wooden foliage creaks with heat
And there are woollen buns to eat—
Bright-varnished buns to touch and see
And, black as an Inferno, tea.
Then (Recketts’ blue) a puff of wind....
Heredity regains my mind
And I am sitting in the train
While thought becomes like flesh,—the brain
Not independent, but derived
From hairy matter that half lived—
Identities not round or whole.
A questing beast who thirsts for soul,
The furry vegetation there—
Purring with heat, sucks in the air;
And dust that’s gathered in the train,
Protecting flesh, seems almost brain—
(That horny substance altering sight);
How strange, intangible is light
Whence all is born, and yet by touch
We live,—the rest is not worth much....
Once more the world grows furred with sleep,—
But I must on the surface keep
While mammoths from the heat are born—
Great clumsy trains with tusk and horn
Whereon the world’s too sudden tossed
Through frondage of our mind, and lost.
PORTRAIT OF A BARMAID
METALLIC waves of people jar
Through crackling green toward the bar
Where on the tables, chattering-white,
The sharp drinks quarrel with the light.
Those coloured muslin blinds the smiles
Shroud wooden faces in their wiles—
Sometimes they splash like water (you
Yourself reflected in their hue).
The conversation, loud and bright,
Seems spinal bars of shunting light
In firework-spirting greenery,
O complicate machinery
For building Babel, iron crane
Beneath your hair, that blue-ribbed mane
In noise and murder like the sea
Without its mutability
Outside the bar, where jangling heat
Seems out of tune and off the beat,
A concertina’s glycerine
Exudes and mirrors in the green
Your soul, pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints.
MATERIALISM; OR, PASTOR —— TAKES THE RESTAURANT CAR FOR HEAVEN
UPON sharp floods of noise there glide
The red-brick houses, float, collide
With aspidestras, trains on steel
That lead us not to what we feel.
Hot glassy lights fill up the gloom
As water an aquarium,—
All mirror-bright; beneath these seen,
Our faces coloured by their sheen,
Seem objects under water, bent
By each bright-hued advertisement
Whose words are stamped upon our skin
As though the heat had burnt them in.
The jolting of the train that made
All objects coloured bars of shade,
Projects them sideways till they split
Splinters from eyeballs as they flit.
Down endless tubes of throats we squeeze
Our words, lymphatic paint to please
Our sense of neatness, neutralize
The overtint and oversize.
I think it true that Heaven should be
A narrow train for you and me,
Where we perpetually must haunt
The moving oblique restaurant
And feed on foods of other minds
Behind the hot and dusty blinds.
THAÏS IN HEAVEN
WHEN you lay dying fast, you said—
And, weeping, were not comforted:
“Look through this paper world! I see
The lights of Heaven burn like gold
The other side; and Souls are sold
For these, yet only flesh, sold we!”
And then you died and went to bliss.—
I’m curious now to know if love
Is really Heaven—where you rove.—
Your kind of love ... or mine, Thaïs?
And is there still the clinging mud?
I think it drowned your soul like wine.
And do the stars like street-lamps shine,
Gilding the gutters where you stood,
And lighting up your small face where
Thin powder, like a trail of dust,
Shows the mortality of lust ...
Still black as hissing rain, your hair?
Your body had become your soul....
Thaïs,—do spirits crumble whole?
FOUR NOCTURNES
I
PROCESSIONS
WITHIN the long black avenues of Night
Go pageants of delight,
With masks of glass the night has stained with wine,
Hair lifted like a vine;—
And all the coloured curtains of the air
Were fluttered. Passing there,
The sounds seemed warring suns; and music flowed
As blood; the mask’d lamps showed
Tall houses light had gilded like despair:
Black windows, gaping there.
Through all the rainbow spaces of our laughter
Those pageants followed after;
The negress Night, within her house of glass
Watched the processions pass.
II
GAIETY
BLOW out the candles. Let the dance begin.
Already, pale as Sin,
The candles weep and pry like living things ...
They dance, who have no wings.
More vast and black than endless sleep, this room.
Time beats his empty drum
Whose hollow sound is echoed in our eyes—
Deep wells where no moon lies.
A crumpled paper mask hides every face—
Creased to a smile of grace,
With eyelids gilded, so the bitter tears
Make music for men’s ears.
These masks, some coloured like an August moon,
Or white, as sands that swoon
Within Time’s hour-glass, some as grey as rain,—
Still mimic joy and pain.
Thin pointed rags and tags edge our attire ...
Bright plumes?... or tongues of fire,
Whose painted laughter cracks the gilded sky
Of this flat empery
That has no soil where any flower may root,
Nor rest for weary foot,
But endless leagues of mirror: such the ground
That no horizons bound,—
Carved topaz water;—sound a mirror seems!
O! nakedness of dreams
Beneath the blinding radiance of hot skies
Where no sun lives or dies.
. . .
Now that the dusty, creaking curtain, Day,
Is folded, laid away,
Each masked dancer is both piercèd Heart
And Dream, its poiniard.
Small winds creep from Infinity.... A flame
Our blown hair, white as shame.
Those seeds of worlds, the stars, are nought but blown
Red tinsel from a Clown;
The candles, living things to dance and pry:
Out! hard Reality!
III
VACUUM
BLOWN through the leaden circles of our hell,
Each wisp of soul, tattered by winds of lust,
Clawed at the voices, like a beaten bell.
No movement ever raised the lifeless dust,
As, blown beneath the night’s enormous pall,
We call to you with goatish prance and paces:
Our lips are red as nights of festival
And hell has dyed its fires upon our faces.
These barren bodies may no children breed
To quench the sun with their corrupted breath
Save these our hearts, our breasts, our bodies feed—
The fruit of love like ours, the worms of death.
Within our brain the darkness slowly fell:
Our eyes’ dark vacuum reflects no days—
No voice, no sight, no thought within our hell—
But only flesh our loneliness allays.
IV
“ET L’ON ENTEND À PEINE LEURS PAROLES”
MONOTONOUSLY fell the rain,
Like thoughts within an empty brain;
The lolling weeds that fattened there
Absorbed the broken lifeless air.
“Do those dim eyes still hold a flame
That leaps to Heaven at my name?”
“Mine eyes would hold God’s face in sight;
But your lips burned away the light.”
“Within your brain the blood runs high?”
“You came like thought; you licked it dry.”
“Oh, we have burnt our souls with lust
Till they are whiter than the dust ...
Now are they white as purity?”
“You blind mine eyes ... I cannot see.”
“I am so tired—I fain would creep
To hide within your heart and weep.”
“My heart is dust ... no tears to shed.”
“But carrion lives—it lives”—I said.
TREATS
I
FUNERALS
BENEATH umbrellas I can see
Pink faces sheened with stupidity,
With whiskers spirting from them, (days
Of boredom, black and sentient rays
From other personalities.)
And, mourners too, white-bearded seas
Walk slowly by them as they come,
Sing hymns to the wind’s harmonium.
Old men shake hands; their clawing grasp
Seems like a door without a clasp—
That gapes on slow black emptiness....
Now,—vanished is her cracked black dress,
The house grows tall from vacancy,
And in the kitchen I take tea
While the furry sun creeps out—that raw
Life,—sheathes its murderous claw
And lets its tongue slink out to lap
The silence—(a slow-leaking tap)....
II
THE COUNTY CALLS
THEY came upon us like a train—
A rush, a scream, then gone again!
With bodies like a continent
Encased in silken seas, they went
And came and called and took their tea
And patronised the Deity
Who copies their munificence
With creditable heart and sense.
Each face a plaster monument
For some belovèd aliment,
Whose everlasting sleep they deign
To cradle in the Great Inane;
Each tongue, a noisy clockwork bell
To toll the passing hour that fell;
Each hat, an architect’s device
For building churches, cheap and nice.
I saw the County Families
Advance and sit and take their teas;
I saw the County gaze askance
At my thin insignificance:
Small thoughts like frightened fishes glide
Beneath their eyes’ pale glassy tide:
They said: “Poor thing! we must be nice!”
They said: “We know your father!”—twice.
III
SOLO FOR EAR-TRUMPET
THE carriage brushes through the bright
Leaves (violent jets from life to light).
Strong polished speed is plunging, heaves
Between the showers of bright hot leaves.
The window-glasses glaze our faces
And jarr them to the very basis,—
But they could never put a polish
Upon my manners, or abolish
My most distinct disinclination
For calling on a rich relation!
In her house, bulwark built between
The life man lives and visions seen,—
The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,
Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,
And silence hisses like a snake,
Invertebrate and rattling ache.
. . . .
Till suddenly, Eternity
Drowns all the houses like a sea,
And down the street the Trump of Doom
Blares,—barely shakes this drawing-room
Where raw-edged shadows sting forlorn
As dank dark nettles. Down the horn
Of her ear-trumpet I convey
The news that: “It is Judgment Day!”
“Speak louder; I don’t catch, my dear.”
I roared: “It is the Trump we hear!”
“The What?”—“The TRUMP!” ... “I shall complain—
The boy-scouts practising again!”
ANTIC HAY
HOW like a lusty satyr, the hot sun
Doth in his orbit run
O’er rivers and the light blue hills of noon,
And where the white still moon
Sleeps in the lovely woodlands of the light.
Made drunken with his might,
Like flames the goat-foot satyrs leap and fling
The blossom’d beans of Spring.
The oreads leave their swan-like fountains, bells
Of foam, and dark wood-wells,
And grasses where the pale dew lovelorn lies
And like an echo dies.
The river-gods are tossing their blue manes
Still wet with brine; the reins
Lie loosely on their plunging horses; earth
Shakes with the storm of mirth;
And all the cloudy castles of the air
Are bathed with radiance. There,
Beneath dark chestnut trees, King Pan doth sport
With all his hornèd court.
Their goat-feet clattering to the oaten tune
That cools the heat of noon
Like water gurgling; hoofs all wreath’d with flowers,
Wild as the dew-pale hours,
The clownish satyrs dance the antic hay;
They butt with horns and sway,
While laughing leaves, like smitten cymbals thrill
Their sunburnt dance; until
The light falls like a rain of panick’d leaves
Through the gold heart of eves.
O’er misty fields, mild Dian’s old faint horn
Bloweth a sound forlorn.
Then from their hives with palest flowers bedight,
The yellow bees take flight—
Whirling where old Silenus tries to sing
Unto his hornèd King
—Feeding upon gold-freckled strawberries—
And sting the poor fat fool until he cries.
LULLABY
GOLDEN night-airs lull his eyes,
Starlight come not where Love lies,
Lest your faint light touch his wings
Who swiftly comes and swiftly flies;
Lovers, wake him not with sighs,
But list where Philomela sings
Lullaby.
Dreams come tiptoe to his bed,
Dim fantastic wings outspread
To fan his pretty sleeping eyes.
Upon my breast he laid his head
(On lilies white heap roses red);
Hushed in my maiden heart, Love lies
A-sleeping.
WATER MUSIC
FROM Florence and from Venice,
Like silver swans at noon,
That silken dim winds menace—
Each barque a drownèd moon,
I’ll bring you freights of amber,
Perfumèd like the rose,
To build your sleeping chamber,
And song-birds for your close;
Faint stars to go a-singing,
Like fluttering nightingales
From golden cages winging,
When, Love, your tir’d wing fails.
And as we come a-rowing,
Great rainbows rise and swing
Like haughty peacocks bowing
In the gardens of the King.
THE WEB OF EROS
WITHIN your magic web of hair lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world;
The dire gold of the comet’s wind-blown hair,
The songs that turned to gold the evening air
When all the stars of heaven sang for joy;
The flames that burnt the cloud-high city Troy;
The mænad fire of spring on the cold earth,
The myrrh-lit flames that gave both life and birth
To the soul-Phœnix, and the star-bright shower
That came to Danæ in her brazen tower.
Within your burning web of hair lies furled
The fire and splendour of the ancient world.
DROWNED SUNS
THE swans more white than those forgotten fair
Who ruled the kingdoms that of old-time were,
Within the sunset water deeply gaze
As though they sought some beautiful dim face,
The youth of all the world; or pale lost gems,
And crystal shimmering diadems,
The moon for ever seeks in woodland streams
To deck her cool faint beauty; thus in dreams,
Belov’d, I seek lost suns within your eyes
And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.
THE SPIDER
THE fat light clings upon my skin,
Like grease that slowly forms a thin
And foul white film; so close it lies,
It feeds upon my lips and eyes.
The black fly hits the window-pane
That shuts its dirty body in;
So once, his spirit fought to quit
The body that imprisoned it.
He always seemed so fond of me,
Until one day he chanced to see
My head, a little on one side,
Loll softly as if I had died.
Since then, he rarely looked my way,
Though he could never know what lay
Within my brain; though iron his will,
I thought, he’s young and teachable.
And often, as I took my drink,
I chuckled in my heart to think
Whose dark blood ran within his veins:
You see, it spared me half my pains.
The time was very long until
I had the chance to work my will;
Once seen, the way was clear as light,
A father’s patience infinite.
He always was so sensitive;
But soon I taught him how to live
With each day, just a patch of white,
A blinded patch of black, each night.
Each day he watched my gaiety.
It’s very difficult to die
When one is young.... I pitied him,
The glass I filled up to the brim,
His shaking fingers scarce could hold;
His limbs were trembling as with cold....
I waited till from night and day
All meaning I had wiped away,
And then I gave it him again;
The wine made heaven in his brain.
Then spider-like, the kindly wine
Thrust tentacles through every vein,
And knotted him so very fast
I knew I had him safe at last.
And sometimes in the dawn, I’d creep
To watch him as he lay asleep,
And each time, see my son’s face grown
In some blurred line, more like my own.
A crumpled rag, he lies all night
Until the first white smear of light;
And sleep is but an empty hole ...
No place for him to hide his soul,
No outlet there to set him free:
He never can escape from me.
Yet still I never know what thought,
All fly-like, in his mind lies caught:
His face seems some half-spoken word
Forgot again as soon as heard,
Beneath the livid skin of light;
Oh, just an empty space of white,
Now all the meaning’s gone. I’ll sit
A little while, and stare at it.
THE DRUNKARD
THIS black tower drinks the blinding light.
Strange windows livid white,
Tremble beneath the curse of God.
Yet living weeds still nod
To the huge sun, a devil’s eye
That tracks the souls that die.
The clock beats like the heart of Doom
Within the narrow room;
And whispering with some ghastly air
The curtains float and stir.
But still she never speaks a word;
I think she hardly heard
When I with reeling footsteps came
And softly spoke her name.
But yet she does not sleep. Her eyes
Still watch in wide surprise
The thirsty knife that pitied her;
But those lids never stir,
Though creeping Fear still gnaws like pain
The hollow of her brain.
She must have some sly plan, the cheat,
To lie so still. The beat
That once throbbed like a muffled drum
With fear to hear me come,
Now never sounds when I creep nigh.
Oh! she was always sly.
And if to spite her, I dared steal
Behind her bed, and feel
With fumbling fingers for her heart ...
Ere I could touch the smart,
Once more wild shriek on shriek would tear
The dumb and shuddering air....
And still she never speaks to me.
She only smiles to see
How in dark corners secret-sly
New-born Eternity,
All spider-like, doth spin and cast
Strange threads to hold Time fast.