Oh wagon-lits and tickets bought from Cook’s,
Surpassing all the fairy-tales in books!
Warm exhalations, streets with spicy smells
And oh, the Poe-like harmonies of bells!
Venice and Ruskin and The Deadly Lamps,
The pulsing cafés and patchouli’d vamps
With sticky flowers in their copper hair,
The languid music throbbing on the air!
The Watteau fêtes galantes, the bistre-brown
Sombrero’d poets, yet without a crown
To purchase food; the graceful unwashed hands
And flung-proud gestures of these Southern lands!
The tiny shiny shoes with pointed tips
And carmine-rouged pursed petulance of lips!
But all the while the young man’s pockets burned,
And all the while he piteously yearned
For lucre; many azure nights he’d lain
With shirt-front soaked and squelching in champagne
And pleasures, money, all are volatile,
For after belching Pol-Roger the bile
Will wreak revenge.
And thus it came about
That when his full supply had given out,
The harlots would no longer share his bed;
Since he could pay no cash, they, laughing, said:
“One sucks the orange, throws away the peel.”
The young man’s vanity forbade him kneel
As penitent before his father’s glare,
Before the well-staged patronising stare
Of his familiar family—poor things—
How they would love to clip his phœnix-wings!
So he became a labourer and slept
In musty garrets where the grey mice crept,
With cobwebs and the gibbering of bats
And scuttling cockroaches, and lice, and rats
Who dragged their heavy bellies on the floor
Thud, thud and thud; the creaking of the door
In twilight cavernous, the broken pane
Through which the hiss and crackle of the rain
Would slant in rivulets across the planks,
The thunder tramped, the lightning played his pranks
Like a young leopard prancing from the skies
Divinely, whilst the tough wind slapped its thighs.
Through dismal days he sweated at the plough.
And half a crust beneath an apple-bough
Became his nourishment, and so he thinned
In figure-line; the sweltering east wind
And thick-flamed sun had bronzed his body quite....
And often through the oozing hours of night
He’d sing a sparkling catch of better times—
No longer pedant à propos of rhymes,
He’d hum or whistle: “Gosh, she looks immense,
You never met a girl like sweet Hortense,”
With genuine emotion in his throat.
But soon he was reduced to pawning coat
And hat; dismissed for superflux of dreams
Or bathing on hot afternoons in streams
When there was corn to reap, or hay to store
In soporific barns; and all the more
He dreamt of silken harlots, velvet wine.
A tender farmer let him tend the swine.
With weighty flanks well caked in slime, a sow
Grunted and suckled farrow, whilst a cow
Lowed like a mellow snore; a mastiff whined
To demonstrate sheer vacancy of mind.
“Shall I arise and go? ’tis not too late
To gain an entrance to my father’s gate.”
The young man shook his head and muttered “No,
Nor shall arise, nor to my father go.”
He had acquired a preference to dine
On scraps amongst the confidential swine.
Ventilation
OPEN the window! now that breezes play
Over the wrinkled hills; the sweltering day
Fused by the wedge-shaped engines of the sun
With heat intensive, split as flowers spun
Of glass to myriad particles minute
With spot-like swiftness, hovers chilled and mute.
Now that no far voice cleaves the air or blurs,
No plash, no fall of oars, no rumour stirs,
And life itself has long outbreathed its lungs—
(Or so it seems, for no dim amorous tongues
Trouble the foliage, and the moon is full,
Unflecked by wind-froth); all seems sorrowful
With beauty exanimate, a beauty dead,
A subterranean silence where vague dread
Puckers the brooding soul until it weeps
Terrible heavy tears. The garden sleeps....
Sleeps as the desolate magnificence
Of Angkor with its grave mute eloquence
Where blistering suns, invectives of the wind
Hurl vainly; frenzied storms undisciplined
Beat, plunge inanely at the steadfast walls.
And no sad throat of nightingale enthralls
The quickly-pulsing heart with turbulent song.
So massive has the stillness grown, so strong
A blood-vessel would burst, a muscle snap,
A sane malt mind would rave, grow weak as pap....
Oh aching ears, have you too heard the lips
Of silence utter some apocalypse
To slake the agony of my desires,
To scatter them like ashes of the pyres
Of calcined and cremated limbs? but hark
In the faint failing distances what spark
Of flashed sound quivers? hold your breath, what flush
Of fluid moan? The sluice is opened; rush
And avalanche of panic-writhing cries.
Some soul in anguish is it? vague surmise
As of some tragedy—I shudder, shake
With fear....
It is the peacocks by the lake!