"Vos caresses brûlantes, vos savantes caresses,
sont pareilles à des tâtonnements d'aveugles
qui vont ramant par les couloirs d'un labyrinthe!
Vos baisers out toujours l'acharnement infatigable
d'un dialogue enragé entre deux sourds
emprisonnés au fond d'un cachot noir."
Even more characteristic of the feverish, but not unhealthy ardour of the book is that series of ten poems entitled Le Démon de la Vitesse, a kind of railway journey of the modern soul. For now the poet, stoking the engines of his pounding brain with the monstrous coals of his own energy, drives his train of Æschylean images (well equipped with all the latest modern inventions) with all the record-breaking rapidity of some Trans-American express, from the "vermilion terraces of love," across "Hindu evenings," "tyrannical rivers," "avenging forests," "milleniar torrents," and "the dusky corpulence of mountains," to traverse "the delirium of Space," and "the supreme plateaux of an absurd Ideal," to end finally in the grinding shock of a collision and all the agony of a shipwrecked vessel. It is in this series of poems that the author's wealth of imagery, always superabundant, lavishes its most profound and incessant exuberance.
For such phrases as "the drunken fulness of streaming stars in the great bed of heaven," "oh, folly, my folly, oh, Eternal Juggler," "O wind, crucified beneath the nails of the stars," "the flesh scorched in the burning tunic of a terrible desire," "the sad towns crucified on the great crossed arms of thewhite road" are not mere isolated flashes of poetical riches, but casual samples of an opulence displaying itself on this same grandiose scale throughout every line of every poem. Note, also, that the poet has completely fused himself with the whole scientific universe. He will thus portray a man in the terms of some dynamic entity of mechanical science, which as likely as not will itself be represented in terms of humanity. Contrast, for instance, such phrases as—
"Les géantes pneumatiques de l'Orgueil," or "train fougueux de mon âme,"
with—
"Colonnes de fumée, immenses bras de nègre,
annelés d'étincelles et de rubis sanglants."
To sum up the essential character of Destruction, we would say that releasing poetry from the shackles of the conventional subject-matter, the conventional language, and the conventional metres to which it had been so long confined, it lays the hitherto untravelled lines of the speed and beauty of the whole of modern civilisation, with its all-unexplored scientific and psychological regions, as it sings the rushing rhapsody of the whole spirit of the twentieth century.
"I bid ye pant your fury and your spleen,
I reck not the long roarings of your wrath,
O galloping Simoons of my ambition,
Who heavily the city's threshold paw,
Nor ever shall ye cross her sensual walls,
Ye neigh in vain in my stopped ears, already
With rosy murmurs steeped and stupefied
(And subterranean voices of the deep),
Like spells of freshness full of the sea's song."
The above quotation may perhaps give such readers as have not the luxury of the French language some faint shadow of the warm charm of La Ville Charnelle, which, at any rate from the conventional standard of ordinary æsthetic beauty, represents the zenith of M. Marinetti's poetical achievement. For in his second volume of verse, our author abandons the furious pace of his rushing modernity to sing the almost sensual beauty of a tropical town, with "the silky murmur of its African sea," its pointed "mosques of desire," and its "hills moulded like the knees of women, and swathed in the linen billows of its dazzling chalk." The swift piston rhythm of Destruction is exchanged for a measure which, though untrammelled by any tight convention, is often clad in the Turkish trousers of some languorous rhyme, or slides with the voluptuous swish of some blank alexandrine. But if the flood of images has abated its turbulence to a serener beauty, it has not thereby suffered any loss of volume, as is evidenced by such phrases as "les molles éméraudes de prairies infinies," "la bouche éclatée des horizons engloutisseurs," or "jusqu'au volant trapeze de ce grand vent gymnaste."
Or take the following passage from The Banjoes of Despair and of Adventure: