I
FOR three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
No, hardly but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
Ἵδυεν λάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὃς’ ἐνἰ Τροίη
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.
II
THE age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
III
THE tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola “replaces”
Sappho’s barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects—after Samothrace;
We see τὀ καλόν
Decreed in the market place.
Faun’s flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint’s vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
τίν’ ἀνδρα, τίν’ ήρωά, τίνα θεὀν,
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
IV
THESE fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ...
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later ...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” ...
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
THERE died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
YEUX GLAUQUES
GLADSTONE was still respected,
When John Ruskin produced
“Kings’ Treasuries”; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused.
Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice
When that faun’s head of hers
Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons
Have preserved her eyes;
Still, at the Tate, they teach
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin like brook-water,
With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born
In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same
Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin’d face,
Questing and passive....
“Ah, poor Jenny’s case” ...
Bewildered that a world
Shows no surprise
At her last maquero’s
Adulteries.
“SIENA MI FE’; DISFEÇEMI
MAREMMA”
AMONG the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub ...
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed—
Tissue preserved—the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood,”
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.
BRENNBAUM
THE sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant’s face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable.”
MR NIXON
IN the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht
Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay. “Consider
“Carefully the reviewer.
“I was as poor as you are;
“When I began I got, of course,
“Advance on royalties, fifty at first,” said Mr. Nixon,
“Follow me, and take a column,
“Even if you have to work free.
“Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
“I rose in eighteen months;
“The hardest nut I had to crack
“Was Dr. Dundas.
“I never mentioned a man but with the view
“Of selling my own works.
“The tip’s a good one, as for literature
“It gives no man a sinecure.
“And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
“And give up verse, my boy,
“There’s nothing in it.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Likewise a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me:
Don’t kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your game
And died, there’s nothing in it.
X
BENEATH the sagging roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world’s welter
Nature receives him,
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
XI
CONSERVATRIX of Milésien”
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, “Milésian” is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her
Older than those her grandmother
Told her would fit her station.
XII
DAPHNE with her thighs in bark
Stretches toward me her leafy hands,”—
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine’s commands,
Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.
. . . . . . . . . .
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
ENVOI (1919)
GO, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes;
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.
Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Reeking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.
Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
1920 (MAUBERLEY)
I
TURNED from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:
“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert,”
And his tool
The engraver’s.
Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;
Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.
II
“Qu’est ce qu’ils savent de l’amour, et
qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre?
S’ils ne comprennent pas la poèsie,
s’ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu’est ce
qu’ils peuvent comprendre de cette passion
en comparaison avec laquelle la rose
est grossière et le parfum des violettes un
tonnerre?” CAID ALI
For three years, diabolus in the scale,
He drank ambrosia,
All passes, ANANGKE prevails,
Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.
He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,
Amid her galaxies,
NUKTIS AGALMA
. . . . . . . . . .
Drifted ... drifted precipitate,
Asking time to be rid of....
Of his bewilderment; to designate
His new found orchid....
To be certain ... certain ...
(Amid ærial flowers) ... time for arrangements—
Drifted on
To the final estrangement;
Unable in the supervening blankness
To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff
Until he found his seive....
Ultimately, his seismograph:
—Given that is his “fundamental passion”
This urge to convey the relation
Of eye-lid and cheek-bone
By verbal manifestations;
To present the series
Of curious heads in medallion—
He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,
The wide-banded irises
And botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis;
Which anæsthesis, noted a year late,
And weighed, revealed his great affect,
(Orchid), mandate
Of Eros, a retrospect.
. . .
Mouths biting empty air,
The still stone dogs,
Caught in metamorphosis, were
Left him as epilogues.
“THE AGE DEMANDED”
Vide Poem II. Page 54
FOR this agility chance found
Him of all men, unfit
As the red-beaked steeds of
The Cytheræan for a chain bit.
The glow of porcelain
Brought no reforming sense
To his perception
Of the social inconsequence.
Thus, if her colour
Came against his gaze,
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze
He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty had been.
. . . . . . . . . .
The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand
Burst in upon the porcelain revery:
Impetuous troubling
Of his imagery.
. . . . . . . . . .
Mildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,
His sense of graduations,
Quite out of place amid
Resistance to current exacerbations,
Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity
Gradually led him to the isolation
Which these presents place
Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.
By constant elimination
The manifest universe
Yielded an armour
Against utter consternation,
A Minoan undulation,
Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances
Strengthened him against
The discouraging doctrine of chances,
And his desire for survival,
Faint in the most strenuous moods,
Became an Olympian apathein
In the presence of selected perceptions.
A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,
The unexpected palms
Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge,
Left him delighted with the imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,
Incapable of the least utterance or composition,
Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition”
Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,
August attraction or concentration.
Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession
Irresponse to human aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial manna,
Lifting the faint susurrus
Of his subjective hosannah.
Ultimate affronts to human redundancies;
Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters”
Leading, as he well knew,
To his final
Exclusion from the world of letters.
IV
SCATTERED Moluccas
Not knowing, day to day,
The first day’s end, in the next noon;
The placid water
Unbroken by the Simoon;
Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns,
Tawn fore-shores
Washed in the cobalt of oblivions;
Or through dawn-mist
The grey and rose
Of the juridical
Flamingoes;
A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of intermittences;
Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforecasted beach:
Then on an oar
Read this:
“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.”
MEDALLION
LUINI in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.
The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.
Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;
The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.
CANTOS
THE FOURTH CANTO
PALACE in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary-stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!
The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare,
Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;
Dew-haze blurrs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple trees,
Choros nympharum, goat-foot with the pale foot alternate;
Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,
A black cock crows in the sea-foam;
And by the curved carved foot of the couch,
claw-foot and lion head, an old man seated
Speaking in the low drone: ...
“Ityn!
“Et ter flebiliter. Ityn, Ityn!
“And she went toward the window and cast her down,
“All the while, the while, swallows crying:
“Ityn!”
“ “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”
“ “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?”
“ “No other taste shall change this.”
And she went toward the window,
the slim white stone bar
Making a double arch;
Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone;
Swung for a moment,
and the wind out of Rhodez
Caught in the full of her sleeve.
... the swallows crying:
“Ityn! Ityn!”
Actaeon....
And a valley,
The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees,
The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top,
Like a fish-scale roof,
Like the church-roof in Poictiers
If it were gold.
Beneath it, beneath it
Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disk of sunlight
Flaking the black, soft water;
Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana,
Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air,
Shaking, air alight with the goddess
fanning their hair in the dark,
Lifting, lifting and waffing:
Ivory dipping in silver,
Shadow’d, o’ershadow’d
Ivory dipping in silver,
Not a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight.
Then Actaeon: Vidal,
Vidal. It is old Vidal speaking,
stumbling along in the wood,
Not a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight,
the pale hair of the goddess.
The dogs leap on Actaeon,
“Hither, hither, Actaeon,”
Spotted stag of the wood;
Gold, gold, a sheaf of hair,
Thick like a wheat swath,
Blaze, blaze in the sun,
The dogs leap on Actaeon.
Stumbling, stumbling along in the wood,
Muttering, muttering Ovid:
“Pergusa ... pool ... pool ... Gargaphia,
“Pool, pool of Salmacis.”
The empty armour shakes as the cygnet moves.
Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleils plovil,
The liquid, and rushing crystal
whirls up the bright brown sand.
Ply over ply, thin glitter of water;
Brook film bearing white petals
(“The pines of Takasago grow with pines of Isé”)
“Behold the Tree of the Visages.”
The forked tips flaming as if with lotus,
Ply over ply
The shallow eddying fluid
beneath the knees of the gods.
Torches melt in the glare
Set flame of the corner cook-stall,
Blue agate casing the sky, a sputter of resin;
The saffron sandal petals the narrow foot, Hymenaeus!
Io Hymen, Io Hymenaee! Aurunculeia!
The scarlet flower is cast on the blanch-white stone,
Armaracus, Hill of Urania’s Son.
Meanwhile So-Gioku:
“This wind, sire, is the king’s wind,
this wind is wind of the palace
Shaking imperial water-jets.”
And Ran-Ti, opening his collar:
“This wind roars in the earth’s bag,
it lays the water with rushes;
“No wind is the king’s wind.
Let every cow keep her calf.”
“This wind is held in gauze curtains....”
“No wind is the king’s....”
The camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs,
look down to Ecbatan of plotted streets,
“Danae! Danae!
What wind is the king’s?”
Smoke hangs on the stream,
The peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water,
Sound drifts in the evening haze,
The barge scrapes at the ford.
Gilt rafters above black water;
three steps in an open field
Gray stone-posts leading nowhither.
The Spanish poppies swim in an air of glass.
Père Henri Jacques still seeks the sennin on Rokku.
Polhonac,
As Gyges on Thracian platter, set the feast;
Cabestan, Terreus.
It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.
Vidal, tracked out with dogs ... for glamour of Loba;
Upon the gilded tower in Ecbatan
Lay the god’s bride, lay ever
Waiting the golden rain.
Et saave!
But to-day, Garonne is thick like paint, beyond Dorada,
The worm of the Procession bores in the soup of the crowd
The blue thin voices against the crash of the crowd
Et “Salve regina.”
In trellises
Wound over with small flowers, beyond Adige
In the but half-used room, thin film of images,
(by Stefano)
Age of unbodied gods, the vitreous fragile images
Thin as the locust’s wing
Haunting the mind ... as of Guido ...
Thin as the locust’s wing. The Centaur’s heel
Plants in the earth-loam.
THE FIFTH CANTO
GREAT bulk, huge mass, thesaurus;
Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out;
The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan,
City of patterned streets; again the vision:
Down in the viae stradae, toga’d the crowd, and arm’d,
Rushing on populous business, and from parapets
Looked down—I looked, and thought: at North
Was Egypt, and the celestial Nile, blue-deep, cutting low barren land,
Old men and camels working the water-wheels;
Measureless seas and stars,
Iamblichus’ light, the souls ascending,
Sparks, like a partridge covey,
From the “ciocco,” brand struck in the game,
“Et omniformis”:
Air, fire, the pale soft light.
Topaz, I manage, and three sorts of blue;
but on the barb of time.
The fire? always, and the vision always,
Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting
And fading at will. Weaving with points of gold,
Gold-yellow, saffron ...
the Roman shoe, Aurunculeia’s
And come shuffling feet, and cries “Da nuces!
“Nuces” praise and Hymenaeus “brings the girl to her man,”
Titter of sound about me, always
and from Hesperus ...
Hush of the older song: “Fades light from seacrest.
“And in Lydia walks with pair’d women
“Peerless among the pairs, and that once in Sardis
“In satieties ...
“Fades the light from the sea, and many things
“Are set abroad and brought to mind of thee,”
And the vinestocks lie untended, new leaves come to the shoots,
North wind nips on the bough, and seas in heart
Toss up chill crests,
And the vine stocks lie untended
And many things are set abroad and brought to mind
Of thee, Atthis, unfruitful.
The talks ran long in the night.
And from Mauleon, fresh with a new earned grade,
In maze of approaching rain-steps, Poicebot—
The air was full of women. And Savairic Mauleon
Gave him his land and knight’s fee, and he wed the woman.
Came lust of travel on him, of romerya;
And out of England a knight with slow-lifting eyelids
Lei fassa furar a del, put glamour upon her ...
And left her an eight months gone.
Came lust of woman upon him,
Poicebot, now on North road from Spain
(Sea-change, a grey in the water)
And in small house by town’s edge
Found a woman, changed and familiar face,
Hard night, and parting at morning.
And Pieire won the singing,
Song or land on the throw, Pieire de Maensac,
and was dreitz hom
And had De Tierci’s wife and with the war they made,
Troy in Auvergnat.
While Menelaus piled up the church at port
He kept Tyndarida. Dauphin stood with de Maensac.
John Borgia is bathed at last.
(Clock-tick pierces the vision)
Tiber, dark with the cloak, wet cat, gleaming in patches.
Click of the hooves, through garbage,
Clutching the greasy stone. “And the cloak floated”
Slander is up betimes.
But Varchi of Florence,
Steeped in a different year, and pondering Brutus,
Then
SIGA MAL AUTHIS DEUTERON!
“Dog-eye!!” (to Alessandro)
“Whether for Love of Florence,” Varchi leaves it,
Saying, “I saw the man, came up with him at Venice,
“I, one wanting the facts,
“And no mean labour.
Or for a privy spite?”
Good Varchi leaves it,
But: “I saw the man. Se pia?
“O empia? For Lorenzaccio had thought of stroke in the open
“But uncertain (for the Duke went never unguarded) ...
“And would have thrown him from wall
“Yet feared this might not end him, or lest Alessandro
“Know not by whom death came,
O si credesse
“If when the foot slipped, when death came upon him,
“Lest cousin Duke Alessandro think he had fallen alone
“No friend to aid him in falling.”
Caina attende.
As beneath my feet a lake, was ice in seeming.
And all of this, runs Varchi, dreamed out before hand
In Perugia, caught in the star-maze by Del Carmine,
Cast on a natal paper, set with an exegesis, told,
All told to Alessandro, told thrice over,
Who held his death for a doom.
In abuleia.
But Don Lorenzino
“Whether for love of Florence ... but:
“O si morisse, credesse caduto da se.”
SIGA, SIGA!
The wet cloak floats on the surface,
Schiavoni, caught on the wood-barge,
Gives out the afterbirth, Giovanni Borgia
Trails out no more at night, where Barabello
Prods the Pope’s elephant, and gets no crown, where Mozarello
Takes the Calabrian roadway, and for ending
Is smothered beneath a mule,
a poet’s ending,
Down a stale well-hole, oh a poet’s ending. “Sanazarro
“Alone out of all the court was faithful to him”
For the gossip of Naples’ trouble drifts to North,
Fracastor (lightning was midwife) Cotta, and Ser D’Alviano,
Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ombra,
Talk the talks out with Navighero,
Burner of yearly Martials,
(The slavelet is mourned in vain)
And the next comer
says “were nine wounds,
“Four men, white horse with a double rider,”
The hooves clink and slick on the cobbles ...
Schiavoni ... the cloak floats on the water,
“Sink the thing,” splash wakes Schiavoni;
Tiber catching the nap, the moonlit velvet,
Wet cat, gleaming in patches.
“Se pia,” Varchi,
“O empia, ma risoluto
“E terribile deliberazione”
Both sayings run in the wind,
Ma si morisse!
THE SIXTH CANTO
THE tale of thy deeds Odysseus!” and Tolosan
Ground rents, sold by Guillaume, ninth duke of Aquitaine;
Till Louis is wed with Eleanor; the wheel ...
(“Conrad, the wheel turns and in the end turns ill”)
And Acre and boy’s love ... for her uncle was
Commandant at Acre, she was pleased with him;
And Louis, French King, was jealous of days unshared
This pair had had together in years gone;
And he drives on for Zion, as “God wills”
To find, in six weeks time, the Queen’s scarf is
Twisted a-top the casque of Saladin.
“For Sandbrueil’s ransom.” But the pouch-mouths add,
“She went out hunting, and the palm-tufts
“Give shade above mottled columns, and she rode back late,
“Late, latish, yet perhaps it was not too late.”
Then France again, and to be rid of her
To brush his antlers: Poictiers, Aquitaine!
And Adelaide Castilla wears the crown.
Eleanor down water-butt, dethroned, debased, unqueen’d.
Unqueen’d five rare long months,
And face sand-red, pitch gait, Harry Plantagenet,
The sputter in place of speech,
But King, about to be, King Louis! takes a queen.
“E quand lo reis Louis lo entendit
mout er fasché”
And yet Gisors, in six years thence,
Was Marguerite’s. And Harry joven
In pledge for all his life and life of all his heirs
Shall have Gisors and Vexis and Neauphal, Neufchastel;
But if no issue, Gisors shall revert
And Vexis and Neufchastel and Neauphal to the French crown.
“Si tuit li dol el plor el marrimen
Del mon were set together they would seem but light
Against the death of the young English King,
Harry the Young is dead and all men mourn, a song,
Mourn all good courtiers, fighters, cantadors.”
And still Old Harry keeps grip on Gisors
And Neufchastel and Neauphal and Vexis;
And two years war, and never two years go by
but come new forays, and “The wheel
“Turns, Conrad, turns, and in the end toward ill.”
And Richard and Alix span the gap, Gisors,
And Eleanor and Richard face the King,
For the fourth family time Plantagenet
Faces his dam and whelps, ... and holds Gisors,
Now Alix’ dowry, against Philippe-Auguste
(Louis’ by Adelaide, wood-lost, then crowned at Etampe)
And never two years sans war.
And Zion still
Bleating away to Eastward, the lost lamb,
Damned city (was only Frederic knew
The true worth of, and patched with Malek Kamel
The sane and sensible peace to bait the world
And set all camps disgruntled with all leaders.
“Damn’d atheists!” alike Mahomet growls,
And Christ grutches more sullen for Sicilian sense
Than does Mahound on Malek.)
The bright coat
Is more to the era, and in Messina’s beach-way
Des Barres and Richard split the reed-lances
And the coat is torn.
(Moving in heavy air: Henry and Saladin.)
(The serpent coils in the crowd.)
The letters run: Tancred to Richard:
That the French King is
More against thee, than is his will to me
Good and in faith; and moves against your safety.
Richard to Tancred:
That our pact stands firm,
And, for these slanders, that I think you lie.
Proofs, and in writing:
And if Bourgogne say they were not
Deliver’d by hand and his,
Let him move sword against me and my word.
Richard to Philip: silence, with a tone.
Richard to Flanders: the subjoined and precedent.
Philip a silence; and then, “Lies and turned lies
“For that he will fail Alix
“Affianced, and Sister to Ourself.”
Richard: “My father’s bed-piece! A Plantagenet
“Mewls on the covers, with a nose like his, already.”
Then:
In the Name
Of Father and of Son Triune and Indivisible
Philip of France by Goddes Grace
To all men presents that our noble brother
Richard of England engaged by mutual oath
(a sacred covenant applicable to both)
Need not wed Alix but whomso he choose
We cede him Gisors Neauphal and Vexis
And to the heirs male of his house
Cahors and Querci Richard’s the abbeys ours
Of Figeac and Souillac St. Gilles left still in peace
Alix returns to France.
Made in Messina in
The year 1190 of the Incarnation of the Word.
Reed lances broken, a cloak torn by Des Barres
Do turn King Richard from the holy wars.
And “God aid Conrad
“For man’s aid comes slow,” Aye tarries upon the road,
En Bertrans cantat.
And before all this
By Correze, Malemort
A young man walks, at church with galleried porch
By river-marsh, pacing,
He was come from Ventadorn; and Eleanor turning on thirty years,
Domna jauzionda, and he says to her
“My lady of Ventadorn
“Is shut by Eblis in, and will not hawk nor hunt
“Nor get her free in the air,
nor watch fish rise to bait
“Nor the glare-wing’d flies alight in the creek’s edge
“Save in my absence, Madame.
‘Que la lauzeta mover,’
“Send word, I ask you, to Eblis,
you have seen that maker
“And finder of songs, so far afield as this
“That he may free her,
who sheds such light in the air.”
THE SEVENTH CANTO
ELEANOR (she spoiled in a British climate)
‘Ελανδρος and Ελέπτολις, and poor old Homer
blind, blind as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge—; rattle of old men’s voices;
And then the phantom Rome, marble narrow for seats
“Si pulvis nullus....”
In chatter above the circus, “Nullum excute tamen.”
Then: file and candles, e li mestiers ecoutes;
Scene—for the battle only,—but still scene,
Pennons and standards y cavals armatz,
Not mere succession of strokes, sightless narration,
To Dante’s “ciocco,” the brand struck in the game.
Un peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.
Contre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,
Un vieux piano, et sous le baromètre ...
The old men’s voices—beneath the columns of false marble,
And the walls tinted discreet, the modish, darkish green-blue,
Discreeter gilding, and the panelled wood
Not present, but suggested, for the leasehold is
Touched with an imprecision ... about three squares;
The house a shade too solid, and the art
A shade off action, paintings a shade too thick.
And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi
Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion,
Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things,
And the old voice lifts itself
weaving an endless sentence.
We also made ghostly visits, and the stair
That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,
Knocking at empty rooms, seeking a buried beauty;
And the sun-tanned gracious and well-formed fingers
Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle
Twists for the knocker’s fall; no voice to answer.
A strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed.
Sceptic against all this one seeks the living,
Stubborn against the fact. The wilted flowers
Brushed out a seven year since, of no effect.
Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched,
Flimsy and damned partition.
Ione, dead the long year,
My lintel, and Liu Ch’e’s lintel.
Time blacked out with the rubber.
The Elysée carries a name on
And the bus behind me gives me a date for peg;
Low ceiling and the Erard and silver,
These are in “time.” Four chairs, the bow-front dresser,
The pannier of the desk, cloth top sunk in.
“Beer-bottle on the statue’s pediment!
“That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,
“Contemporary.” And the passion endures.
Against their action, aromas; rooms, against chronicles.
Smaragdos, chrysolitos, De Gama wore striped pants in Africa
And “Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops,”
Le vieux commode en acajou:
beer bottles of various strata.
But is she as dead as Tyro? In seven years?
Έλέναυς, έλανδρος, έλέπτολις,
The sea runs in the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles,
Eleanor!
The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow;
Lamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir,
And all that day
Nicea moved before me
And the cold gray air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin,
And the long slender feet lit on the curb’s marge
And her moving height went before me,
We alone having being.
And all that day, another day:
Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
speaking a shell of speech ...
Propped between chairs and table ...
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being,
A dryness calling for death.
Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,
“Toc” sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,
And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness;
The older shell, varnished to lemon colour,
Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,
Dry professorial talk ...
now stilling the ill beat music,
House expulsed by this house, but not extinguished.
Square even shoulders and the satin skin,
Gone cheeks of the dancing woman,
Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out
It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,
A petrification of air.
The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself.
The young men, never!
Only the husk of talk.
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus
Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight
Drowning with tears, new Eros,
And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blurr;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
For dead Sicheus.
Life to make mock of motion:
For the husks, before me, move,
The words rattle: shells given out by shells.
The live man, out of lands and prisons,
shakes the dry pods,
Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques
Bend to the tawdry table,
Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,
And make sound like the sound of voices.
Lorenzaccio
Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.
Ma si morisse!
Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse.
And the tall indifference moves,
a more living shell,
Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact,
O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,
Eternal watcher of things,
Of things, of men, of passions.
Eyes floating in dry, dark air;
E biondo, with glass-gray iris, with an even side-fall of hair
The stiff, still features.