Early Writings

  True, it was Venice,

  And at Florian’s17 and under the north arcade

  I have seen other faces, and had my rolls for breakfast, for that

  matter;

  So, for what it’s worth, I have the background.

  And you had a background,

  Watched “the soul,” Sordello’s soul,

  And saw it lap up life, and swell and burst—

  “Into the empyrean?”

  So you worked out new form, the meditative,

  Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story,

  And we will say: What’s left for me to do?

  Whom shall I conjure up; who’s my Sordello,

  My pre-Daun Chaucer,18 pre-Boccacio,

  As you have done pre-Dante?

  Whom shall I hang my shimmering garment on;

  Who wear my feathery mantle, hagoromo;19

  Whom set to dazzle the serious future ages?

  Not Arnaut, not De Born, not Uc St. Circ20 who has writ out

  the stories.

  Or shall I do your trick, the showman’s booth, Bob Browning,

  Turned at my will into the Agora,

  Or into the old theatre at Aries,

  And set the lot, my visions, to confounding

  The wits that have survived your damn’d Sordello?

  (Or sulk and leave the word to novelists?)

  What a hodge-podge you have made there!—

  Zanze and swanzig, of all opprobrious rhymes!

  And you turn off whenever it suits your fancy,

  Now at Verona, now with the early Christians,

  Or now a-gabbling of the “Tyrrhene whelk.”

  “The lyre should animate but not mislead the pen”—

  That’s Wordsworth, Mr. Browning. (What a phrase!—

  That lyre, that pen, that bleating sheep, Will Wordsworth!)

  That should have taught you avoid speech figurative

  And set out your matter

  As I do, in straight simple phrases:

  Gods float in the azure air,

  Bright gods, and Tuscan, back before dew was shed,

  It is a world like Puvis’?21

  Never so pale, my friend,

  ’Tis the first light—not half light—Panisks22

  And oak-girls and the Maenads23

  Have all the wood. Our olive Sirmio

  Lies in its burnished mirror, and the Mounts Balde and Riva

  Are alive with song, and all the leaves are full of voices.

  “Non è fuggito.”

  “It is not gone.” Metastasio

  Is right—we have that world about us,

  And the clouds bow above the lake, and there are folk upon

  them

  Going their windy ways, moving by Riva,

  By the western shore, far as Lonato,

  And the water is full of silvery almond-white swimmers,

  The silvery water glazes the up-turned nipple.

  How shall we start hence, how begin the progress?

  Pace naif Ficinus,24 say when Hotep-Hotep

  Was a king in Egypt—

  When Atlas sat down with his astrolabe,

  He, brother to Prometheus, physicist—

  Say it was Moses’ birth-year?

  Exult with Shang25 in squatness? The sea-monster

  Bulges the squarish bronzes.

  (Confucius later taught the world good manners,

  Started with himself, built out perfection.)

  With Egypt!

  Daub out in blue of scarabs, and with that greeny turquoise?

  Or with China, O Virgilio mio, and gray gradual steps

  Lead up beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars,

  Temple of teak wood, and the gilt-brown arches

  Triple in tier, banners woven by wall,

  Fine screens depicted, sea waves curled high,

  Small boats with gods upon them,

  Bright flame above the river! Kwannon26

  Footing a boat that’s but one lotus petal,

  With some proud four-spread genius

  Leading along, one hand upraised for gladness,

  Saying, “Tis she, his friend, the mighty goddess! Paean!

  Sing hymns ye reeds,

  and all ye roots and herons and swans be glad,

  Ye gardens of the nymphs put forth your flowers.”

  What have I of this life,

  Or even of Guido?27

  Sweet lie!—Was I there truly?

  Did I know Or San Michele?28

  Let’s believe it.

  Believe the tomb he leapt29 was Julia Laeta’s?

  Friend, I do not even—when he led that street charge—

  I do not even know which sword he’d with him.

  Sweet lie, “I lived!” Sweet lie, “I lived beside him.”

  And now it’s all but truth and memory,

  Dimmed only by the attritions of long time.

  “But we forget not.”

  No, take it all for lies.

  I have but smelt this life, a whiff of it—

  The box of scented wood

  Recalls cathedrals. And shall I claim;

  Confuse my own phantastikon,30

  Or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me

  Contains the actual sun;

  confuse the thing I see

  With actual gods behind me?

  Are they gods behind me?

  How many worlds we have! If Botticelli

  Brings her ashore on that great cockle-shell-

  His Venus (Simonetta?),

  And Spring and Aufidus31 fill all the air

  With their clear-outlined blossoms?

  World enough. Behold, I say, she comes

  “Apparelled like the spring, Graces her subjects,”

  (That’s from Pericles).

  Oh, we have worlds enough, and brave décors,

  And from these like we guess a soul for man

  And build him full of aery populations.

  Mantegna32 a sterner line, and the new world about us:

  Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis.

  If for a year man write to paint, and not to music—

  O Casella!33

  II

  Leave Casella.1

  Send out your thought upon the Mantuan palace—2

  Drear waste, great halls,

  Silk tatters still in the frame, Gonzaga’s splendor

  Alight with phantoms! What have we of them,

  Or much or little?

  Where do we come upon the ancient people?

  “All that I know is that a certain star”—

  All that I know of one, Joios, Tolosan,3

  Is that in middle May, going along

  A scarce discerned path, turning aside,

  In level poplar lands, he found a flower, and wept.

  “Y a la primera flor, ” he wrote,

  “Qu’ieu trobei, tornei em plor.”4

  There’s the one stave, and all the rest forgotten.

  I’ve lost the copy I had of it in Paris,

  Out of the blue and gilded manuscript

  Decked out with Couci’s rabbits,

  And the pictures, twined with the capitals,

  Purporting to be Arnaut’s and the authors.

  Joios we have. By such a margent stream,

  He strayed in the field, wept for a flare of color,

  When Coeur de Lion was before Chalus.5

  Or there’s En Arnaut’s score of songs, two tunes;

  The rose-leaf casts her dew on the ringing glass,

  Dolmetsch6 will build our age in witching music.

  Viols da Gamba, tabors, tympanons:

  “Yin-yo laps in the reeds, my guest departs,

  The maple leaves blot up their shadows,

  The sky is full of autumn,

  We drink our parting in saki.

  Out of the night comes troubling lute music,

  And we cry out, asking the singer’s name,

  An
d get this answer:

  ‘Many a one

  Brought me rich presents; my hair was full of jade,

  And my slashed skirts, drenched in expensive dyes,

  Were dipped in crimson, sprinkled with rare wines.

  I was well taught my arts at Ga-ma-rio,

  And then one year I faded out and married.’

  The lute-bowl hid her face.

  We heard her weeping.”7

  Society, her sparrows, Venus’ sparrows, and Catullus

  Hung on the phrase (played with it as Mallarmé

  Played for a fan, “Rêveuse pour que je plonge, ”);8

  Wrote out his crib from Sappho:

  “God’s peer that man is in my sight—

  Yea, and the very gods are under him,

  Who sits opposite thee, facing thee, near thee,

  Gazing his fill and hearing thee,

  And thou smilest. Woe to me, with

  Quenched senses, for when I look upon thee, Lesbia,

  There is nothing above me

  And my tongue is heavy, and along my veins

  Runs the slow fire, and resonant

  Thunders surge in behind my ears,

  And the night is thrust down upon me.”

  That was the way of love, flamma dimanat.9

  And in a year, “I love her as a father”;

  And scarce a year, “Your words are written in water”;

  And in ten moons, “Caelius, Lesbia illa—

  That Lesbia, Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia

  Whom Catullus once loved more

  Than his own soul and all his friends,

  Is now the drab of every lousy Roman.”

  So much for him who puts his trust in woman.

  So the murk opens.

  Dordoigne! When I was there,

  There came a centaur, spying the land,

  And there were nymphs behind him.

  Or going on the road by Salisbury

  Procession on procession—

  For that road was full of peoples,

  Ancient in various days, long years between them.

  Ply over ply of life still wraps the earth here.

  Catch at Dordoigne.

  Viscount St. Antoni

  In the warm damp of spring,

  Feeling the night air full of subtle hands,

  Plucks at a viol, singing:

  “As the rose—

  Si com, si com”—they all begin “si com.”

  “For as the rose in trellis

  Winds in and through and over,

  So is your beauty in my heart, that is bound through and over.

  So lay Queen Venus in her house of glass,

  The pool of worth thou art,

  Flood-land of pleasure.”

  But the Viscount Pena

  Went making war into an hostile country

  Where he was wounded:

  “The news held him dead.”

  St. Antoni in favor, and the lady

  Ready to hold his hands—

  This last report upset the whole convention.

  She rushes off to church, sets up a gross of candles,

  Pays masses for the soul of Viscount Pena.

  Thus St. Circ has the story:

  “That sire Raimon Jordans, of land near Caortz,

  Lord of St. Antoni, loved this Viscountess of Pena10

  ‘Gentle’ and ‘highly prized.’

  And he was good at arms and bos trobaire,11

  And they were taken with love beyond all measure,”

  And then her husband was reported dead,

  “And at this news she had great grief and sorrow,”

  And gave the church such wax for his recovery,

  That he recovered, and

  “At this news she had great grief and teen,”

  And fell to moping, dismissed St. Antoni;

  “Thus was there more than one in deep distress.”

  So ends that novel. And the blue Dordoigne

  Stretches between white cliffs,

  Pale as the background of a Leonardo.

  “As rose in trellis, that is bound over and over,”

  A wasted song?

  No Elis, Lady of Montfort,

  Wife of William à Gordon, heard of the song,

  Sent him her mild advances.

  Gordon? Or Gourdon12

  Juts into the sky

  Like a thin spire,

  Blue night’s pulled down around it

  Like tent flaps, or sails close hauled. When I was there,

  La noche de San Juan, a score of players

  Were walking about the streets in masquerade,

  With pikes and paper helmets, and the booths,

  Were scattered align, the rag ends of the fair.

  False arms! True arms? You think a tale of lances ...

  A flood of people storming about Spain!

  My cid rode up to Burgos,13

  Up to the studded gate between two towers,

  Beat with his lance butt.

  A girl child of nine,

  Comes to a little shrine-like platform in the wall,

  Lisps out the words, a-whisper, the King’s writ:

  “Let no man speak to Diaz or give him help or food

  On pain of death, his eyes torn out,

  His heart upon a pike, his goods sequestered.”

  He from Bivar, cleaned out,

  From empty perches of dispersed hawks,

  From empty presses,

  Came riding with his company up the great hill—

  “Afe Minaya!”—14

  to Burgos in the spring,

  And thence to fighting, to down-throw of Moors,

  And to Valencia rode he, by the beard!—

  Muy velida.15

  Of onrush of lances,

  Of splintered staves, riven and broken casques,

  Dismantled castles, of painted shields split up,

  Blazons hacked off, piled men and bloody rivers;

  Then “sombre light upon reflecting armor”

  And portents in the wind, when De las Nieblas

  Set out to sea-fight,

  “Y dar neuva lumbre las armas y hierros. ”16

  Full many a fathomed sea-change in the eyes

  That sought with him the salt sea victories.

  Another gate?

  And Kumasaka’s ghost17 come back to tell

  The honor of the youth who’d slain him.

  Another gate.

  The kernelled walls of Toro, las almenas;18

  Afield, a king come in an unjust cause.

  Atween the chinks aloft flashes the armored figure,

  Muy linda, a woman, Helen, a star,

  Lights the king’s features ...

  “No use, my liege—

  She is your highness’ sister,” breaks in Ancures;

  “Mal fuego s’enciende!”19

  Such are the gestes of war “told over and over.”

  And Ignez?

  Was a queen’s tire-woman,

  Court sinecure, the court of Portugal;

  And the young prince loved her—Pedro,

  Later called the cruel. And other courtiers were jealous.

  Two of them stabbed her with the king’s connivance,

  And he, the prince, kept quiet a space of years—

  Uncommon the quiet.

  And he came to reign, and had his will upon the dagger-

  players,

  And held his court, a wedding ceremonial—

  He and her dug-up corpse in cerements

  Crowned with the crown and splendor of Portugal.

  A quiet evening and a decorous procession;

  Who winked at murder kisses the dead hand,

  Does leal homage,

  “Que depois de ser morta foy Rainha. ”20

  Dig up Camoens,21 hear out his resonant bombast:

  “That among the flowers,

  As once was Proserpine,

  Gatheredst thy soul’s light fruit a
nd every blindness,

  Thy Enna the flary mead-land of Mondego,

  Long art thou sung by maidens in Mondego.”

  What have we now of her, his “linda Ignez”?

  Houtmans in jail for debt in Lisbon—how long after?—

  Contrives a company, the Dutch eat Portugal,

  Follow her ship’s tracks, Roemer Vischer’s daughters,

  Talking some Greek, dally with glass engraving;

  Vondel, the Eglantine, Dutch Renaissance22—

  The old tale out of fashion, daggers gone;

  And Gaby wears Braganza23 on her throat—

  Commuted, say, another public pearl

  Tied to a public gullet. Ah, mon rêve,

  It happened; and now go think—

  Another crown, thrown to another dancer, brings you to

  modern times?

  I knew a man,24 but where ’twas is no matter:

  Born on a farm, he hankered after painting;

  His father kept him at work;

  No luck—he married and got four sons;

  Three died, the fourth he sent to Paris—

  Ten years of Julian’s and the ateliers,

  Ten years of life, his pictures in the salons,

  Name coming in the press.

  And when I knew him,

  Back once again, in middle Indiana,

  Acting as usher in the theatre,

  Painting the local drug-shop and soda bars,

  The local doctor’s fancy for the mantel-piece;

  Sheep—jabbing the wool upon their flea-bit backs—

  The local doctor’s ewe-ish pastoral;

  Adoring Puvis, giving his family back

  What they had spent for him, talking Italian cities,

  Local excellence at Perugia,

  dreaming his renaissance,

  Take my Sordello!

  III

  Another’s a half-cracked fellow—John Heydon,1

  Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation,

  In thoughts upon pure form, in alchemy,

  Seer of pretty visions (“servant of God and secretary of

  nature”);

  Full of a plaintive charm, like Botticelli’s,

  With half-transparent forms, lacking the vigor of gods.

  Thus Heydon, in a trance, at Bulverton,

  Had such a sight:

  Decked all in green, with sleeves of yellow silk

  Slit to the elbow, slashed with various purples.

  Her eyes were green as glass, her foot was leaf-like.

  She was adorned with choicest emeralds,

  And promised him the way of holy wisdom.

  “Pretty green bank,” began the half-lost poem.

  Take the old way, say I met John Heydon,