‘Isabel Starling he stately passes—’
No, that wasn’t right; Sparling, not Starling. No, no, what was he thinking about? Not Sparling, or Starling, or anything resembling it. ‘Paradise verdure he stately passes.’ That was better. The following line had long words in it which he didn’t understand. The next verse started pleasantly—
‘The angels at play on its fields of Summer* (their wild wings rustled his guide’s cigars).’ No, not cigars, something else, word he didn’t know: cigars would do.
‘Looked up from dessert at the passing comer* as they pelted each other with handfuls of stars.’
Ah! That was why the stars were there, they’d got loose on to the printed page: stars did, if you happened to get a knock or a fall.
‘And Isabel Sparling with startled feet rose,* hand on sword, by their tethered cars.’
Wrong, wrong! not ‘Isabel Sparling’—‘warden spirits’: whatever made him say Isabel Sparling? she wasn’t a warden spirit or anything like one. But ‘tethered cars’ was right: ‘motor-bus’ would have been better.
After that his reading ceased to be consecutive or to convey any sense—only colour and a sort of atmosphere. ‘Plumes night-tinctured, englobed and cinctured,’ then a star, followed by ‘saints’: ‘crystalline pale,’ and another star: ‘Heaven’—ah, yes, Heaven, the place the stars came from: then ‘the immutable crocean dawn’—crocean meant yellow—‘enthusing’—no, not enthusing ‘effusing.’ ‘Crocean dawn effusing’ meant ‘yellow dawn coming.’ If that was what he meant, why couldn’t the fellow say so? Why did poets always choose the difficult words? Ahead lay more light and colour, mixed with other things he didn’t fully understand—or want to; he was getting too sleepy for it. ‘Bickering Conference’: no, not conference: ‘gonfalons’: better go back and read again, he was only making nonsense; but ‘Crocean dawn effusing’ was nonsense too. ‘Ribbed fire,’ ‘flame-plumed fan’—‘globing clusters,’ and stars everywhere with no sense to them. But the poet had splendid eyes—must have had, to see all that!
His lids closed, then opened again: he had almost gone to sleep with the light still on. ‘Crocean dawn’: half consciously he switched it off—not the dawn, the light; and with the crocean dawn still in his head slept till morning.