This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous.
He is happier in his rôle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.
"Beauty for some provides escape,
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying."
But Frascati's shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:
"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 stream of blood or kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Rag-time.... 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."
This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his best poem, Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt, an attempt to "fish up a single day" from a dead friend's forgotten existence. John Ridley, as he calls him, wakes from a dream among his familiar books and pictures—
"Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.
Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's?
Distressing circumstance.
But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,
Which was some consolation. What a chin!
Civilised ten thousand years, and still
No better way than rasping a pale mask
With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:
Repulsive task!
And the more odious for being quotidian.
If one should live till eighty-five ...
And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?...
Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!
He wept to think of all those single beds,
Those desperate night-long solitudes,
Those mental salons full of nudes.
Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.
Eight thousand nights alone—minus, perhaps,
Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.
Five little bits of heaven
(Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum),
Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse,
High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly
In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine
(Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness),
And he would shut his eyes so as not to see
His own hot blushes calling him a swine."
At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes into the bathroom—
"Pitiable to be
Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.
There was his scar, a panel of old rose
Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;
Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,
Permanent souvenir of the Great War.
One of God's jokes, typically good,
That wound of his. How perfect that he should
Have suffered it for—what?"
He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and The Times: he reads some of his old work ...