“Darling, will you become a part
Of my poor physiology?
And, my beloved, may I have
The latchkey of your history?
And while this corpse is what it is
Dear, we must share geographies.”
So many conditions of felicity.
And now time was a widening gulf and space,
A fixed between, and fate still kept them apart.
Her voice quite gone; distance had blurred her face.
The life so short, so vast love’s science and art.
So many conditions—and yet, once,
Four whole days,
Four short days of perishing time,
They had fulfilled them all.
But that was long ago, ah! long ago,
Like the last horse bus, or the Christmas pantomime,
Or the Bells, oh, the Bells, of Edgar Allan Poe.
III
“HELEN, your letter, proving, I suppose,
That you exist somewhere in space, who knows?
Somewhere in time, perhaps, arrives this morning,
Reminding me with a note of Lutheran warning
That faith’s the test, not works. Works!—any fool
Can do them if he tries to; but what school
Can teach one to credit the ridiculous,
The palpably non-existent? So with us,
Votaries of the copulative cult,
In this affair of love, quicumque vult,
Whoever would be saved, must love without
Adjunct of sense or reason, must not doubt
Although the deity be far removed,
Remote, invisible; who is not loved
Best by voluptuous works, but by the faith
That lives in absence and the body’s death.
I have no faith, and even in love remain
Agnostic. Are you here? The fact is plain,
Constated by the heavenly vision of you,
Maybe by the mouth’s warm touch; and that I love you,
I then most surely know, most painfully.
But now you’ve robbed the temple, leaving me
A poor invisibility to adore,
Now that, alas, you’re vanished, gone . . . no more;
You take my drift. I only ask your leave
To be a little unfaithful—not to you,
My dear, to whom I was and will be true,
But to your absence. Hence no cause to grieve;
For absence may be cheated of a kiss—
Lightly and laughing—with no prejudice
To the so longed-for presence, which some day
Will crown the presence of
Le Vostre J.
(As dear unhappy Troilus would say).”
IV
OH, the maggots, the maggots in his brains!
Words, words and words.
A birth of rhymes and the strangest,
The most unlikely superfœtations—
New deep thoughts begot by a jingle upon a pun,
New worlds glimpsed through the window of a word
That has ceased, somehow, to be opaque.
All the muses buzzing in his head.
Autobiography crystallised under his pen, thus:
“When I was young enough not to know youth,
I was a Faun whose loves were Byzantine
Among stiff trees. Before me naked Truth
Creaked on her intellectual legs, divine
In being inhuman, and was never caught
By all my speed; for she could outrun thought.
Now I am old enough to know I am young,
I chase more plastic beauties, but inspire
Life in their clay, purity in their dung
With the creative breath of my desire.
And utter truth is now made manifest
When on a certain sleeping face and breast
The moonlight dreams and silver chords are strung,
And a god’s hand touches the aching lyre.”
He read it through: a pretty, clinquant thing,
Like bright spontaneous bird-song in the spring,
Instinct with instinct, full of dewy freshness.
Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;
If he chose to—but it was too much trouble,
And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,
Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned
In pleasant seas . . . to rise again and find
One o’clock struck and his unshaven face
Still like a record in a musical box,
And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury.
V
i.
THE Open Sesame of “Master John,”
And then the broad silk bosom of Aunt Loo.
“Dear John, this is a pleasure. How are you?”
“Well, thanks. Where’s Uncle Will?” “Your uncle’s gone
To Bath for his lumbago. He gets on
As well as anyone can hope to do
At his age—for you know he’s seventy-two;
But still, he does his bit. He sits upon
The local Tribunal at home, and takes
Parties of wounded soldiers out in brakes
To see the country. And three times a week
He still goes up to business in the City;
And then, sometimes, at night he has to speak
In Village Halls for the War Aims Committee.”
ii.
“Well, have you any news about the war?
What do they say in France?” “I daren’t repeat
The things they say.” “You see we’ve got some meat
For you, dear John. Really, I think before
To-day I’ve had no lamb this year. We score
By getting decent vegetables to eat,
Sent up from home. This is a good receipt:
The touch of garlic makes it. Have some more.
Poor Tom was wounded on the twenty-third;
Did you know that? And just to-day I heard
News from your uncle that his nephew James
Is dead—Matilda’s eldest boy.” “I knew
One of those boys, but I’m so bad at names.
Mine had red hair.” “Oh, now, that must be Hugh.”
iii.
“Colonel McGillicuddy came to dine
Quietly here, a night or two ago.
He’s on the Staff and very much in the know
About all sorts of things. His special line
Is Tanks. He says we’ve got a new design
Of super-Tank, with big guns, that can go
(I think he said) at thirty miles or so
An hour. That ought to make them whine
For peace. He also said, if I remember,
That the war couldn’t last beyond September,
Because the Germans’ trucks were wearing out
And couldn’t be replaced. I only hope
It’s true. You know your uncle has no doubt
That the whole thing was plotted by the Pope . . .”
“. . . Good-bye, dear John. We have had a nice talk.
You must soon come again. Good-bye, good-bye. . . .”
He tottered forth, full of the melancholy
That comes of surfeit, and began to walk
Slowly towards Oxford Street. The brazen sky
Burned overhead. Beneath his feet the stones
Were a grey incandescence, and his bones
Melted within him, and his bowels yearned.
VI
THE crowd, the crowd—oh, he could almost cry
To see those myriad faces hurrying by,
And each a strong tower rooted in the past
On dark unknown foundations, each made fast
With locks nobody knew the secret of,
No key could open: save that perhaps love
Might push the bars half back and just peep in—
And see strange sights, it may be. But for him
They were locked donjons, every window bright
With beckoning mystery; and then, Good Night!
The lamp was out, they were passed, they were gone
For ever . . . ever. And one might have been
The hero or the friend long sought, and one
Was the loveliest face his eyes had ever seen,
(Vanished as soon) and he went lonely on.
Then in a sudden fearful vision he saw
The whole world spread before him—a vast sphere
Of seething atoms moving to one law:
“Be individual. Approach, draw near,
Yes, even touch: but never join, never be
Other than your own selves eternally.”
And there are tangents, tangents of thought that aim
Out through the gaps between the patterned stars
At some fantastic dream without a name
That like the moon shining through prison bars,
Visits the mind with madness. So they fly,
Those soaring tangents, till the first jet tires,
Failing, faltering half-way up the sky,
And breaks—poor slender fountain that aspires
Against the whole strength of the heavy earth
Within whose womb, darkly, it took birth.
Oh, how remote he walked along the street,
Jostling with other lumps of human meat!
He was so tired. The café doors invite.
Caverned within them, still lingers the night
In shadowy coolness, soothing the seared sight.
He sat there smoking, soulless and wholly crass,
Sunk to the eyes in the warm sodden morass
Of his own guts, wearily, wearily
Ruminating visions of mortality—
Memento Moris from the pink alcove,
Nightmare oppressiveness of profane love.
Cesspool within, and without him he could see
Nothing but mounds of flesh and harlotry.
Like a half-pricked bubble pendulous in space,
The buttered leatheriness of a Jew’s face
Looms through cigar-smoke; red and ghastly white,
Death’s-head women fascinate the sight.
It was the nightmare of a corpse. Dead, dead . . .
Oh, to wake up, to live again! he fled
From that foul place and from himself.
VII
TWIN domes of the Alhambra,
Veiled tenderness of the sky above the Square:
He sat him down in the gardens, under the trees,
And in the dust, with the point of his umbrella,
Drew pictures of the crosses we have to bear.
The poor may starve, the sick have horrible pains—
But there are pale eyes even in the London planes.
Men may make war and money, mischief and love—
But about us are colours and the sky above.
Yes, here, where the golden domes ring clear,
And the planes patiently, hopefully renew
Their green refrain from year to year
To the dim spring burden of London’s husky blue,
Here he could see the folly of it. How?
Confine a boundless possible within
The prison of an ineluctable Now?
Go slave to pain, woo forth original sin
Out of her lair—and all by a foolish Act?
Madness! But now, Wordsworth of Leicester Square,
He’d learnt his lesson, learnt by the mere fact
Of the place existing, so finely unaware
Of syphilis and the restless in and out
Of public lavatories, and evening shout
Of winners and disasters, races and war.
Troubles come thick enough. Why call for more
By suiting action to the divine Word?
His spleen was chronic, true; but he preferred
Its subtle agony to the brute force
That tugged the barbs of deep-anchored remorse.
The sunlight wrapped folds of soft golden silk
About him, and the air was warm as milk
Against his skin. Long sitting still had made
Cramped soreness such a pleasure, he was afraid
To shift his tortured limbs, lest he should mar
Life’s evenness. London’s noise from afar
Smoothed out its harshness to soothe his thoughts asleep,
Sound that made silence much more calm and deep.
The domes of gold, the leaves, emerald bright,
Were intense, piercing arrows of delight.
He did not think; thought was a shallow thing
To his deep sense of life, of mere being.
He looked at his hand, lying there on his knee,
The blue veins branching, the tendons cunningly
Dancing like jacks in a piano if he shook
A knot-boned finger. Only to look and look,
Till he knew it, each hair and every pore—
It seemed enough: what need of anything more?
Thought, a blind alley; action, which at best
Is cudgelling water that goes back to rest
As soon as you give over your violences.
No, wisdom
