The sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant’s face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai26 and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable.”
MR. NIXON27
In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht
Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay. “Consider
Carefully the reviewer.
I was as poor as you are;
When I began I got, of course,
Advance on royalties, fifty at first,” said Mr. Nixon,
“Follow me, and take a column,
Even if you have to work free.
Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
I rose in eighteen months;
The hardest nut I had to crack
Was Dr. Dundas.
I never mentioned a man but with the view
Of selling my own works.
The tip’s a good one, as for literature
It gives no man a sinecure.
And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There’s nothing in it.”
Likewise a friend of Blougram’s28 once advised me:
Don’t kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your game
And died, there’s nothing in it.
X
Beneath the sagging roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world’s welter
Nature receives him;
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
XI
“Conservatrix of Milésien”29
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, “Milesian” is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her
Older than those her grandmother
Told her would fit her station.
XII
“Daphne with her thighs in bark
Stretches toward me her leafy hands,”—
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine’s commands,
Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.30
ENVOI (1919)
Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:31
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.
Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.
Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
MAUBERLEY 1920
“Vacuos exercet in aera morsus. ”32
I
Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jacquemart”33
To the strait head
Of Messalina:34
“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert,”
And his tool
The engraver’s.
Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;
Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.35
II
“Qu’est ce qu’ils savent de l’amour, et qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre?
S’ils ne comprennent pas la poésie, s’ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre de cette passion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose est grossière et le parfum des violettes un tonnerre?”
—Caid Ali36
For three years, diabolus in the scale,37
He drank ambrosia,
All passes, ANANGKE prevails,38
Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.
He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,
Amid her galaxies,
NUKTOS AGALMA39
Drifted ... drifted precipitate,
Asking time to be rid of ...
Of his bewilderment; to designate
His new found orchid....
To be certain ... certain ...
(Amid ærial flowers) ... time for arrangements—
Drifted on
To the final estrangement;
Unable in the supervening blankness
To sift TO AGATHON40 from the chaff
Until he found his sieve ...
Ultimately, his seismograph:
Given that is his “fundamental passion,”
This urge to convey the relation
Of eye-lid and cheek-bone
By verbal manifestation;
To present the series
Of curious heads in medallion-
He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,
The wide-banded irides41
And botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis;42
Which anæsthesis,43 noted a year late,
And weighed, revealed his great affect,
(Orchid), mandate
Of Eros, a retrospect.
Mouths biting empty air,
The still stone dogs,
Caught in metamorphosis, were
Left him as epilogues.
“THE AGE DEMANDED”
Vide Poem II.
For this agility chance found
Him of all men, unfit
As the red-beaked steeds of
The Cytheræan44 for a chain bit.
The glow of porcelain
Brought no reforming sense
To his perception
Of the social inconsequence.
Thus, if her colour
&
nbsp; Came against his gaze,
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze
He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty had been.
The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand
Burst in upon the porcelain revery:
Impetuous troubling
Of his imagery.
Mildness, amid the neo-Nietzschean clatter,
His sense of graduations,
Quite out of place amid
Resistance to current exacerbations,
Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity
Gradually led him to the isolation
Which these presents place
Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.
By constant elimination
The manifest universe
Yielded an armour
Against utter consternation,
A Minoan undulation,
Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances
Strengthened him against
The discouraging doctrine of chances,
And his desire for survival,
Faint in the most strenuous moods,
Became an Olympian apathein45
In the presence of selected perceptions.
A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,
The unexpected palms
Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge,
Left him delighted with the imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,
Incapable of the least utterance or composition,
Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition,”
Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,
August attraction or concentration.
Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,
Irresponse to human aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial manna,
Lifting the faint susurrus46
Of his subjective hosannah.
Ultimate affronts to
Human redundancies;
Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters”
Leading, as he well knew,
To his final
Exclusion from the world of letters.
IV
Scattered Moluccas47
Not knowing, day to day,
The first day’s end, in the next noon;
The placid water
Unbroken by the Simoon;48
Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns,
Tawn fore-shores
Washed in the cobalt of oblivions;
Or through dawn-mist
The grey and rose
Of the juridical
Flamingoes;
A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of intermittences;
Coracle49 of Pacific voyages,
The unforecasted beach;
Then on an oar
Read this:
“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.”
MEDALLION
Luini50 in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.
The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene51 in the opening
Pages of Reinach.52
Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;
The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.
THE CANTOS
(1917-1922)
THREE CANTOS OF A POEM OF SOME LENGTH
I
Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!1
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;
Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse—this booth is full of the marrow of
wisdom.)
Give up th’ intaglio method.2
Tower by tower
Red-brown the rounded bases, and the plan
Follows the builder’s whim. Beaucaire’s3 slim gray
Leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte—4
Mohammed’s windows, for the Alcazar5
Has such a garden, split by a tame small stream.
The moat is ten yards wide, the inner courtyard
Half a-swim with mire.
Trunk hose?
There are not. The rough men swarm out
In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave of Hearts;
And I discern your story:
Peire Cardinal
Was half forerunner of Dante.6 Arnaut’s7 that trick
Of the unfinished address,
And half your dates are out, you mix your eras;
For that great font8 Sordello sat beside—
’Tis an immortal passage, but the font?—
Is some two centuries outside the picture.
Does it matter?
Not in the least. Ghosts move about me
Patched with histories. You had your business:
To set out so much thought, so much emotion;
To paint, more real than any dead Sordello,
The half or third of your intensest life
And call that third Sordello;
And you’ll say, “No, not your life,
He never showed himself.”
Is’t worth the evasion, what were the use
Of setting figures up and breathing life upon them,
Were ’t not our life, your life, my life, extended?
I walk Verona. (I am here in England.)
I see Can Grande.9 (Can see whom you will.)
You had one whole man?
And I have many fragments, less worth? Less worth?
Ah, had you quite my age, quite such a beastly and
cantankerous age?
You had some basis, had some set belief.
Am I let preach? Has it a place in music?
I walk the airy street,
See the small cobbles flare with the poppy spoil.
’Tis your “great day,” the Corpus Domini,
And all my chosen and peninsular village
Has made one glorious blaze of all its lanes—
Oh, before I was up—with poppy flowers.
Mid-June: some old god eats the smoke, ’tis not the
saints;
And up and out to the half-ruined chapel—
Not the old place at the height of the rocks,
But that splay, barn-like church the Renaissance
Had never quite got into trim again.
As well begin here. Began our Catullus:
“Home to sweet rest, and to the waves’ deep laughter,”
The laugh they wake amid the border rushes.
This is our home, the trees are full of laughter,
And the storms laugh loud, breaking the riven waves
On “north-most rocks”; and here the sunlight
Glints on the shaken waters, and the rain
Comes forth with delicate tread, walking from Isola Garda—
Lo soleils plovil,10
As Arnaut had it in th’ inextricable song.
The very sun rains and
a spatter of fire
Darts from the “Lydian” ripples; “locus undae,” as Catullus,
“Lydiae,”11
And the place is full of spirits.
Not lemures,12 not dark and shadowy ghosts,
But the ancient living, wood-white,
Smooth as the inner bark, and firm of aspect,
And all agleam with colors—no, not agleam,
But colored like the lake and like the olive leaves,
Glaukopos,13 clothed like the poppies, wearing golden greaves,
Light on the air.
Are they Etruscan gods?
The air is solid sunlight, apricus,14
Sun-fed we dwell there (we in England now);
It’s your way of talk, we can be where we will be,
Sirmio serves my will better than your Asolo15
Which I have never seen.
Your “palace step”?
My stone seat was the Dogana’s curb,16
And there were not “those girls,” there was one flare, one face.
’Twas all I ever saw, but it was real....
And I can no more say what shape it was ...
But she was young, too young.