iv
The Burning Wheel (1916) and The Defeat of Youth (1918) were volumes of poems, as was Leda (1920). Only Leda has been published in America. Although it is not ten years since the appearance of Mr. Huxley’s first book, the first (London) editions of all of them are held at a premium by dealers and collectors. One may pay, for a particular item, anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds in some instances—or certainly not less than $60 or $75 in New York. A first edition of a new Huxley is something to put aside carefully. The distinction is unusual among living writers and, in the case of a man under thirty, possibly unique.
The title poem of Leda is an affair of nearly 600 lines, iambic pentameter with an occasional variant, written in rhymed couplets as a continuous narrative with the occasional “paragraphing” usual in narrative blank verse. The subject is the classical myth of Jupiter’s disguise as a swan:
Couched on the flowery ground
Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
The swan’s proud-arching opulent loveliness ...
And over her the swan shook slowly free
The folded glory of his wings, and made
A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame
Of naked light and the sun’s noonday flame.
The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of the futility of science:
But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,
Is still umbilical to earth.
The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”:
Bubble-breasted swells the dome
Of this my spiritual home,
From whose nave the chandelier,
Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.
We in the round balcony sit,
Lean o’er and look into the pit
Where feed the human bears beneath,
Champing with their gilded teeth.
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What steam of blood or kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime.... But when the wearied Band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in Can Grande’s Castle—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of thinking ill of oneself”:
“Misery,” he said, “to have no chin,
Nothing but brains and sex and taste:
Only omissively to sin,
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.”
But of these prose poems the most significant is “Gothic,” fashioned around the nursery couplet:
Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree
As full of apples as can be.
From the opening sentence: “Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling bells” to the evocative closing image—“he had it in turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas”—the piece is a true glimpse into that mind which no more resembles the other minds of its day than St. Paul’s resembles a shop on Bond Street.