Soles occidere et redire possunt, Aldous Huxley

SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT

FOREWORD

JOHN RIDLEY, the subject of this poem, was killed in February 1918. “If I should perish,” he wrote to me only five weeks before his death, “if I should perish—and one isn’t exactly a ’good life’ at the moment—I wish you’d write something about me. It isn’t vanity (for I know you’ll do me, if anything, rather less than justice!), not vanity, I repeat; but that queer irrational desire one has for immortality of any kind, however short and precarious—for frankly, my dear, I doubt whether your verses will be so very much more perennial than brass. Still, they’ll be something. One can’t, of course, believe in any au-delà for one’s personal self; one would have first to believe in some kind of a friendly god. And as for being a spiritualist spook, one of those wretched beings who seem to spend their eternity in trying to communicate with the earth by a single telephone, where the number is always engaged, and the line chronically out of order—well, all I can say is, Heaven preserve me from such a future life. No, my only hope is you—and a damned poor guarantee for eternity. Don’t make of me a khaki image, I beg. I’d rather you simply said of me, as Erasmus did of his brother, ‘Strenuus compotor, nec scortator ignavus.’ I sincerely hope, of course, that you won’t have to write the thing at all—hope not, but have very little doubt you will. Good-bye.”

The following poem is a tentative and provisional attempt to comply with his request. Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that instability of mind “produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other” (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd Instinct), that characteristic instability which makes adolescence so feebly sceptical, so inefficient, so profoundly unhappy. I have fished up a single day from Ridley’s forgotten existence. It has a bedraggled air in the sunlight, this poor wisp of Lethean weed. Fortunately, however, it will soon be allowed to drop back into the water, where we shall all, in due course, join it. “The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been.”

I

BETWEEN the drawing of the blind

And being aware of yet another day

There came to him behind

Close, pregnant eyelids, like a flame of blue,

Intense, untroubled by the wind,

A Mediterranean bay,

Bearing a brazen beak and foamless oars

To where, marmoreally smooth and bright,

The steps soar up in one pure flight

From the sea’s edge to the palace doors,

That have shut, have shut their valves of bronze—

And the windows too are lifeless eyes.

The galley grated on the stone;

He stepped out—and was alone:

No white-sailed hopes, no clouds, nor swans

To shatter the ocean’s calm, to break the sky’s.

Up the slow stairs:

Did he know it was a dream?

First one foot up, then the other foot,

Shuddering like a mandrake root

That hears the truffle-dog at work

And draws a breath to scream;

To moan, to scream.

The gates swing wide,

And it is coolly dark inside,

And corridors stretch out and out,

Joining the ceilings to their floors,

And parallels ring wedding bells

And through a hundred thousand doors

Perspective has abolished doubt.

But one of the doors was shut,

And behind it the subtlest lutanist

Was shaking a broken necklace of tinkling notes,

And somehow it was feminine music.

Strange exultant fear of desire, when hearts

Beat brokenly. He laid his hand on the latch—

And woke 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!

Civilized 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?

But that lute, playing across his dream . . .

Quick drops breaking the sleep of the water-wheel,

Song and ebbing whisper of a summer stream,

Music’s endless inconsequence that would reveal

To souls that listened for it, the all

Unseizable confidence, the mystic Rose,

Could it but find the magical fall

That droops, droops and dies into the perfect close . . .

And why so feminine? But one could feel

The unseen woman sitting there behind

The door, making her ceaseless slow appeal

To all that prowls and growls in the caves beneath

The libraries and parlours of the mind.

If only one were rational, if only

At least one had the illusion of being so . . .

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-de-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

(Like infants’ impoliteness, a terrible infant’s brightness),

And he would shut his eyes so as not to see

His own hot blushes calling him a swine.

Atrocious memory! For memory should be

Of things secure and dead, being past,

Not living and disquieting. At last

He threw the nightmare of his blankets off.

Cloudy ammonia, camels in your bath:

The earth hath bubbles as the water hath:

He was not of them, too, too solidly

Always himself. What foam of kissing lips,

Pouting, parting with the ghost of the seven sips

One smacks for hiccoughs!

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?

II

OH, the dear front page of the Times!

Chronicle of essential history:

Marriage, birth, and the sly mysteriousness

Of lovers’ greetings, of lovers’ meetings,

And dirty death, impartially paid

To courage and the old decayed.

But nobody had been born to-day,

Nobody married that he knew,

Nobody died and nobody even killed;

  He felt a little aggrieved—

  Nobody even killed.

But, to make up: “Tuesday, Colchester train:

Wanted Brown Eyes’ address, with a view to meeting again.”

Dear Brown Eyes, it had been nice of her

To talk so friendly to a lonely traveller!

  Why is it nobody ever talks to me?

And now, here was a letter from Helen.

Better to open it rather than thus

Dwell in a long muse and maze

Over the scrawled address and the postmark,

Staring stupidly.

Love—was there no escape?

Was it always there, always there?

The same huge and dominant shape,

Like Windsor Castle leaning over the plain;

And the letter a vista cut through the musing forest,

At the end the old Round Tower,

Singing its refrain:

Here we are, here we are, here we are again!

The life so short, so vast love’s science and art,

So many conditions of felicity.

  “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