Full text of "Leda"
^•jf.JJJg^:
JOHHTM/
WRARY 1
CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY .
FROM
The 7-I^ay i^helf
„„ Corneir University Library
PR6015.U96L4
Leda.
3 1924 012 974 428
Cornell University
Library
The original of tiiis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012974428
LE D A
By Aldous Huxley
Novels
THOSE BARREN LEAVES
ANTIC HAY
CROME YELLOW
Short Stories
LITTLE MEXICAN
MORTAL COILS
LIMBO
Essays
ALONG THE ROAD
ON THE MARGIN
JESTING PIRATE
Poetry
LEDA
Drama
THE DISCOVERY, adapudfrom Franca
Sheridan
LEDA
BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
LONDON
CHATTO &' WINDOS
First Published April agtk, tgso
Reprinted May ^gjo
" August j-gas
" Oeiottr rgad
/\Ufy^y^ /926
PRINTED m GREAT BRITAIN
ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
CONTENTS
LEDA, I
THE BIRTH OF GOD, 1 9
ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH, 21
SYMPATHY, 22
MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM, 23
FROM THE PILLAR, 24
JONAH, 25
VARIATIONS ON A THEME, 26
A MELODY BY SCARLATTI, 27
A SUNSET, 28
LIFE AND ART, 3O
FIRST philosopher's SONG, 3 1
SECOND philosopher's SONG, 32
FIFTH philosopher's SONG, 33
NINTH philosopher's SONG, 34
MORNING scene, 36 '^'
verrey's, 37
FRASCATl's, 38 V'
FATIGUE, 39
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND, 40
BACK STREETS, 4 1
LAST THINGS, 42
GOTHIC, 43
EVENING PARTY, 44
BEAUTY, 45
SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT, 55
LEDA
LEDA
/ I ' ■ ' I
' V ' Ij 1, I \l I
BROWN and j^ri^ht as an agate, mountain-cool,
Eurotas singing slips from pool to pool ;
Down rocky gullies ; through the cavernous pines ,
Anji chestnut groves ; down where the terraced vines
And gardens overhang ; through vjQleys gr^y
With olive trees, into a soundless bay
Of the ^gean. Silent and asleep
Lie those pools now : but where they dream most deep,
Men sometimes see ripples of shining hair
And the young grace of bodies pale and bare,
Shimmering far down — the ghosts these mirrors hold
Of all the beauty they beheld of old,
White limbs and heavenly eyes and the hair's river of gold,
For once these banks were peopled : Spartan girls
Loosed here their maiden girdles and their curls,
And stooping o'er the level water stole
His darUng mirror from the sun through whole
Rapturous hours of gazing.
The first star
Of all this milky constellation, far
Lovelier than any nymph of wood or green,
Was she whom Tyndarus had made his queen
For her sheer beauty and subtly moving grace —
Leda, the fairest of our mortal race.
Leda
Hymen had lit his torches but one week
About her bed (and still o'er her young cheek
Passed rosy shadows of those thoughts that sped
Across her mind, still virgin, still unwed,
For all her body was her own no more),
When Leda with her maidens to the shore
Of bright Eurotas came, to escape the heat
Of summer noon in waters coolly sweet.
By a brown pool which opened smooth and clear
Below the wrinkled water of a weir
They sat them down under an old fir-tree
To rest : and to the laughing melody
Of their sweet speech the river's rippling bore
A liquid burden, while the sun did pour
Pure colour out of heaven upon the earth.
The meadows seethed with the incessant mirth
Of grasshoppers, seen only when they flew
Their curves of scarlet or sudden dazzling blue.
Within the fir-tree's round of unpierced shade
The maidens sat with laughter and talk, or played,
Gravely intent, their game of knuckle-bones ;
Or tossed from hand to hand the old dry cones
Littered about the tree. And one did sing
A ballad of some far-off Spartan king,
Who took a wife, but left her, weU-away !
Slain by his foes upon their wedding-day.
" That was a piteous story," Leda sighed,
" To be a widow ere she was a bride."
" Better," said one, " to live a virgin life
Alone, and never know the name of wife
And bear the ugly burden of a child
And have great pain by it. Let me live wild,
A bird untamed by man ! " " Nay," cried another,
" I would be wife, if I should not be mother.
Leda
Cypris I honour ; let the vulgar pay
Their gross vows to Lucina when they pray.
Our finer spirits would be blunted quite
By bestial teeming ; but Love's rare delight
Wings the rapt soul towards Olympus' height."
*' Delight ? " cried Leda. " Love to me has brought
Nothing but pain and a world of shameful thought.
When they say love is sweet, the poets lie ; :
'Tis but a trick to catch poor maidens by.
What are their boasted pleasures ? I am queen
To the most royal king the world has seen ;
Therefore I should, if any woman might,
Know at its full that exquisite delight.
Yet these few days since I was made a wife
Have held more bitterness than all my life,
While I was yet a child." The great bright tears
Slipped through her lashes. " Oh, my childish years !
Years that were all my own, too sadly few.
When I was happy — and yet never knew
How happy till to-day ! " Her maidens came
About her as she wept, whispering her name,
Leda, sweet Leda, with a hundred dear
Caressing words to soothe her heavy cheer.
At last she started up with a fierce pride
Upon her face. " I am a queen," she cried,
*' But had forgotten it a while ; and you.
Wenches of mine, you were forgetful too.
Undress me. We would bathe ourself." So proud
A queen she stood, that all her maidens bowed
In trembling fear and scarcely dared approach
To do her bidding. But at last the brooch
Pinned at her shoulder is undone, the wide
Girdle of silk beneath her breasts untied ;
The tunic falls about her feet, and she
Leda
Steps from the crocus folds of drapery,
Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.
God-like she stood ; then broke into a run,
Leaping and laughing in the light, as though
Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow
Of generous, blood and fire that to remain
Too long in statued queenliness were pain
To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.
She ran, easily bounding, like a boy,
Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.
Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest.
If that might be, when she was never less.
Moving or still, than perfect loveliness.
At last, with cheeks afire and heaving flank,
She checked her race, and on the river's bank
Stobd looking down at her own echoed shape
And at the fish that, aimlessly agape.
Hung midway up their heaven of flawless glass.
Like angels waiting for eternity to pass.
Leda drew breath and plunged ; her gasping cry
Splashed up ; the water circled brokenly
Out from that pearly shudder of dipped limbs ;
The glittering pool laughed up its flowery brims,
And everything, save the poor fish, rejoiced :
Their idiot contemplation of the Moist,
The Cold, the Watery, was in a trice
Ended when Leda broke their crystal paradise.
Jove in his high Olympian chamber lay
Hugely supine, striving to charm away
In sleep the long, intolerable noon.
But heedless Morpheus still withheld his boon,
And Jove upon his silk-pavilioned bed
Tossed wrathful and awake. His fevered head
Leda
Swarmed with a thousand fancies, which forecast
Delights to be, or savoured pleasures past.
Closing his eyes, he saw his eagle swift,
Headlong as his own thunder, stoop and lift
On pinions upward labouring the prize
Of beauty ravished for the envious skies.
He saw again that bright, adulterous pair,
Trapped by the limping husband unaware,
Fast in each other's arms, and faster in the snare —
And laughed remembering. Sometimes his thought
Went wandering over the earth and sought
Familiar places — ^temples by the sea,
Cities and islands ; here a sacred tree
And there a cavern of shy nymphs.
He rolled
About his bed, in many a rich fold
Crumpling his Bab^onian coverlet, ?
And yawned and stretched. The smeU of his own sweat
Brought back to mind his Libyan desert -fane
Of mottled granite, with its endless train
Of pilgrim camels, reeking towards the sky
Ammonian incense to his horned deity ;
The while their masters worshipped, offering
Huge teeth of ivory, while some would bring
Their Ethiop wives — sleek wineskins of black silk,
Jellied and huge from drinking asses' milk
Through years of tropical idleness, to pray
For offspring (whom he ever sent away
With prayers unanswered, lest their ebon race
Might breed and blacken the earth's comely face).
Noon pressed on him a hotter, heavier weight.
O Love in Idleness ! how celibate
He felt ! Libido hke a nemesis
Scourged him with itching memories of bliss.
6 Leda
The satin of imagined skin was sleek
And supply warm against his lips and cheek,
And deep within soft hair's dishevelled dusk
His eyelids fluttered ; like a flowery musk
The scent of a young body seemed to float
Faintly about him, close and yet remote —
For perfume and the essence of music dwell
In other worlds among the asphodel
Of unembodied life. Then all had flown ;
His dream had melted. In his bed, alone,
Jove sweating lay and moaned, and longed in vain
To stiU the pulses of his burning pain.
In sheer despair at last he leapt from bed,
Opened the window and thrust forth his head
Into Olympian ether. One fierce frown
Rifted the clouds, and he was looking down
Into a gulf of azure cahn ; the rack
Seethed round about, tempestuously black ;
But the god's eye could hold its angry thunders back.
There lay the world, down through the chasmed blue.
Stretched out from edge to edge unto his view ;
And in the midst, bright as a summer's day
At breathless noon, the Mediterranean lay ;
And Ocean round the world's dim fringes tossed
His glaucous waves in mist and distance lost ;
And Pontus and the livid Caspian Sea
Stirred in their nightmare sleep uneasily.
And 'twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land.
Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand,
And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow
And the white, changeless silences of snow ;
While here and there towns, like a Uving eye
Unclosed on earth's blind face, towards the sky
Glanced their bright conscious beauty. Yet the sight
Leda
Of his fair earth gave him but small delight
Now in his restlessness : its beauty could
Do nought to quench the fever in his blood.
Desire lends sharpness to his searching eyes ;
Over the world his focused passion flies
Quicker than chasing sunlight on a day
Of storm and golden April. Far away
He sees the tranquil rivers of the East,
Mirrors of many a strange barbaric feast,
Where un-HeUenic dancing-girls contort
Their yellow Hmbs, and gibbering masks make sport
Under the moons of many-coloured light
That swing their lantern-fruitage in the night
Of overarching trees. To him it seems
An alien world, peopled by insane dreams.
But these are nothing to the monstrous shapes —
Not men so much as bastardy of apes —
That meet his eyes in Africa. Between
Leaves of grey fungoid pulp and poisonous green,
White eyes from black and browless faces stare.
Dryads with star-flowers in their woolly hair
Dance to the flaccid clapping of their own
Black dangling dugs through forests overgrown,
Platted with writhing creepers. Horrified,
He sees them how they leap and dance, or glide.
Glimpse after black glimpse of a satin skin,
Among unthinkable flowers, to pause and grin
Out through a trellis of suppurating lips.
Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips
And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes
Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes
Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh . . .
He turns
Northward his sickened sight. The desert bums
8 Leda
All life away. Here in the forked shade
Of twin-humped towering dromedaries laid,
A few gaunt folk are sleeping : fierce they seem
Even in sleep, and restless as they dream.
He would be fearful of a desert bride
As of a brown asp at his sleeping side,
Fearful of her white teeth and cunning arts.
Further, yet further, to the ultimate parts
Of the wide earth he looks, where Britons go
Painted among their swamps, and through the snow
Huge hairy snuffling beasts pursue their prey —
Fierce men, as hairy and as huge as they.
Bewildered furrows deepen the Thunderer's scowl ;
This world so vast, so variously foul —
Who can have made its ugliness ? In what
Revolting fancy were the Forms begot
Of all these monsters ? What strange deity —
So barbarously not a Greek ! — ^was he
Who could mismake such beings in his own
Distorted image. Nay, the Greeks alone
Were men ; in Greece alone were bodies fair,
Minds comely. In that all-but-island there,
Cleaving the blue sea with its, promontories,
Lies the world's hope, the seed of all the glories
That are to be ; there, too, must surely live
She who alone can medicinably give
Ease with her beauty to the Thunderer's pain.
Downwards he bends his fiery eyes again,
Glaring on Hellas. Like a beam of light.
His intent glances touch the mountain height
With passing flame and probe the valleys deep,
Rift the dense forest and the age-old sleep
Of vaulted antres on whose pebbly floor
Leda
Gallop the loud-hoofed Centaurs ; and the roar
Of more than human shouting underground
Pulses in living palpable waves of sound
From wall to wall, until it rumbles out
Into the air ; and at that hollow shout
That seems an utterance of the whole vast hill,
The shepherds cease their laughter and are still.
Cities asleep under the noonday sky-
Stir at the passage of his burning eye ;
And in their huts the startled peasants blink
At the swift flash that bursts through every chink
Of wattled walls, hearkening in fearful wonder
Through lengthened seconds for the crash of thunder—
Which follows not : they are the more afraid.
Jove seeks amain. Many a country maid.
Whose sandalled feet pass down familiar ways
Among the olives, but whose spirit strays
Through lovelier lands of fancy, suddenly
Starts broad awake out of her dream to see
A light that is not of the sun, a Hght
Darted by living eyes, consciously bright ;
She sees and feels it Uke a subtle flame
Mantling her limbs vpith fear and maiden shame
And strange desire. Longing and terrified,
She hides her face, like a new-wedded bride
Who feels rough hands that seize and hold her fast ;
And swooning falls. The terrible light has passed ;
She wakes ; the sun stiU shines, the olive trees
Tremble to whispering silver in the breeze
And all is as it was, save she alone
In whose dazed eyes this deathless light has shone :
For never, never from this day forth wiU she
In earth's poor passion find felicity.
Or love of mortal man. A god's desire
I o Leda
Has seared her soul ; nought but the same strong fire
Can Hncile the dead ash to Hfe again,
And all her years will be a lonely pain.
Many a thousand had he looked upon,
Thousands of mortals, young and old ; but none —
Virgin, or young ephebus, or the flower
Of womanhood culled in its full-blown hour —
Could please the Thunderer's sight or touch his mind ;
The longed-for loveliness was yet to find.
Had beauty fled, and was there nothing fair
Under the moon ? The fury of despair
Raged in the breast of heaven's Almighty Lord ;
He gnashed his foamy teeth and rolled and roared
In bull-Hke agony. Then a great cahn
Descended on him : cool and healing balm
Touched his immortal fury. He had spied
Young Leda where she stood, poised on the riverrside.
Even as she broke the river's smooth expanse,
Leda was conscious of that hungry glance,
And knew it for an eye of fearful power
That did so hot and thunderously lour.
She knew not whence, on her frail nakedness.
Jove's heart held but one thought : he must possess
That perfect form or die — ^possess or die.
Unheeded prayers and supplications fly,
Thick as a flock of birds, about his ears.
And smoke of incense rises ; but he hears
Nought but the soft falls of that melody
Which is the speech of Leda ; he can see
Nought but that almost spiritual grace
Which is her body, and that heavenly face
Where gay, sweet thoughts shine through, and eyes are bright
Leda 1 1
With purity and the soul's inward light.
Have her he must : the teasel-fingered burr
Sticks not so fast in a wild beast's tangled fur
As that insistent longing in the soul
Of mighty Jove. Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole
Vast universe was blotted from his thought
And nought remained but Leda's laughter, nought
But Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust.
She was the whole world now ; have her he must, he must . . .
His spirit worked ; how should he gain his end
With most deliciousness ? What better friend,
What counsellor more subtle could he find
Than lovely Aphrodite, ever kind
To hapless lovers, ever cunning, too.
In aU the tortuous ways of love to do
And plan the best ? To Paphos then ! His will
And act were one ; and straight, invisible,
He stood in Paphos, breathing the languid air
By Aphrodite's couch. O heavenly fair
She was, and smooth and marvellously young !
On Tyrian silk she lay, and purple hung
About her bed in folds of fluted light
And shadow, dark as wine. Two doves, more white
Even than the white hand on the purple lying
Like a pale flower wearily dropped, were flying
With wings that made an odoriferous stir.
Dropping faint dews of bakkaris and myrrh,
Musk and the soul of sweet flowers cunningly
Ravished from transient petals as they die.
Two stripUng cupids on her either hand
Stood near with winnowing plumes and gently fanned
Her hot, love-fevered cheeks and eyeUds burning.
Another, crouched at the bed's foot, was turning
A mass of scattered parchments — vows or plaints
I 2 Leda
Or glad triumphant thanks which Venus' saints,
Martyrs and heroes, on her altars strewed
With bitterest tears or gifts of gratitude.
From the pile heaped at Aphrodite's feet
The boy would take a leaf, and in his sweet.
Clear voice would read what mortal tongues can teU
In stammering verse of those ineffable
Pleasures and pains of love, heaven and uttermost hell.
Jove hidden stood and heard him read these lines
Of votive thanks —
Cypris, this Uttle silver lamp to thee
I dedicate.
It was my fellow-watcher, shared with me
Those swift, short hours, when raised above my fate
In Sphenura's white arms I drank
Of immortaHty.
*' A pretty lamp, and I will have it placed
Beside the narrow bed of some too chaste
Sister of virgin Artemis, to be
A night-long witness of her cruelty.
Read me another, boy," and Venus bent
Her ear to listen to this short lament.
Cypris, Cypris, I am betrayed !
Under the same wide mantle laid
I found them, faithless, shameless pair !
Making love with tangled hair.
■" Alas," the goddess cried, " nor god, nor man,
Nor medicinable balm, nor magic can
Cast out the demon jealousy, whose breath
Withers the rose of Hfe, save only time and death."
Another sheet he took and read again.
Farewell to love, and hail the long, slow pain
Of memory that backward turns to joy.
O I have danced enough and enough sung ;
Leda i 3
My feet shall be still now and my voice mute ;
Thine are these withered wreaths, this Lydian flute,
Cypris ; I once was young.
And pietous Aphrodite wept to think
How fadingly upon death's very brink
Beauty and love take hands for one short kiss —
And then the wreaths are dust, the bright-eyed bliss
Perished, and the flute still. " Read on, read on."
But ere the page could start, a lightning shone
Suddenly through the room, and they were 'ware
Of some great terrible presence looming there.
And it took shape — ^huge limbs, whose every Une
A symbol was of power and strength divine,
And it was Jove.
" Daughter, I come," said he,
" For counsel in a case that touches me
Close, to the very life." And he straightway
Told her of all his restlessness that day
And of his sight of Leda, and how great
Was his desire. And so in close debate
Sat the two gods, planning their rape ; while she,
Who was to be their victim, joyously
Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chiU
And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill
And every fear and all, save only this :
That she was young, and it was perfect bliss
To be alive where suns so goldenly shine.
And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine,
And the cicadas sing from morn till night,
And rivers run so cool and pure and bright . . .
Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay
In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away
The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine
As those old images of the gods that shine
14 Leda
With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years
By the touching lips of countless worshippers,
Her body was ; and the sun's golden heat
Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet
And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew
The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue,
Far hiUs and the faint fringes of the sky
Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily,
And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill
Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until
A listener might wonder if they cried
In his own head or in the world outside.
Sometimes she shut her eyelids, and wrapped round
In a red darkness, with the muffled sound
And throb of blood beating within her brain,
Savoured intensely to the verge of pain
Her own young life, hoarded it up behind
Her shuttered lids, until, too long confined,
It burst them open and her prisoned soul
Flew forth and took possession of the whole
Exquisite world about her and was made
A part of it. Meanwhile her maidens played,
Singing an ancient song of death and birth.
Seed-time and harvest, old as the grey earth,
And moving to their music in a dance
As immemorial. A numbing trance
Came gradually over her, as though
Flake after downy-feathered flake of snow
Had muffled all her senses, drifting deep
And warm and quiet.
From this ail-but sleep
She started into life again ; the sky
Was full of a strange tumult suddenly —
Leda i 5
Beating of mighty wings and shrill-voiced fear
And the hoarse sceeam of rapine following near.
In the high windlessness above her flew,
Dazzlingly white on the untroubled blue,
A splendid swan, with outstretched neck and wing
Spread fathom wide, and closely following
An eagle, tawny and black. This god-like pair
Circled and swooped through the calm of upper air,
The eagle striking and the white swan still
'Scaping as though by happy miracle
The imminent talons. For the twentieth time
The furious hunter stooped, to miss and cUmb
A mounting spiral into the height again.
He hung there poised, eyeing the grassy plain
Far, far beneath, where the girls' upturned faces
Were like white flowers that bloom in open places
Among the scarcely budded woods. And they
Breathlessly watched and waited ; long he lay,
Becalmed upon that tideless sea of light.
While the great swan with slow and creaking flight
Went slanting down towards safety, where the stream
Shines through the trees below, with glance and gleam
Of blue aerial eyes that seem to give
Sense to the sightless earth and make it live.
The ponderous wings beat on and no pursuit :
Stiff as the painted kite that guards the fruit,
Afloat o'er orchards ripe, the eagle yet
Hung as at anchor, seeming to forget
His uncaught prey, his rage unsatisfied..
Still, quiet, dead . . . and then the quickest -eyed
Had lost him. Like a star unsphered, a stone
Dropped from the vault of heaven, a javelin thrown,
He swooped upon his prey. Down, down he came,
And through his plumes with a noise of wind-blown flame
I 6 Leda
Loud roared the air. From Leda's lips a cry
Broke, and she hid her face — she could not see him die,
Her lovely, hapless swan.
Ah, had she heard.
Even as the eagle hurtled past, the word
That treacherous pair exchanged. " Peace," cried the swan ;
" Peace, daughter. All my strength wiU soon be gone,
Wasted in tedious flying, ere I come
Where my desire hath set its only home."
" Go," said the eagle, " I have played my part,
Roused pity for your plight in Leda's heart
(Pity the mother of voluptuousness).
Go, father Jove ; be happy ; for success
Attends this moment."
On the queen's numbed sense
Fell a glad shout that ended sick suspense,
Bidding her lift once more towards the light
Her eyes, by pity closed against a sight
Of blood and death — ^her eyes, how happy now
To see the swan stUl safe, while far below,
Brought by the force of his eluded stroke
So near to earth that with his wings he woke
A gust whose sudden silvery motion stirred
The meadow grass, struggled the sombre bird
Of rage and rapine. Loud his scream and hoarse
With baffled fury as he urged his course
Upwards again on threshing pinions wide.
But the fair swan, not daring to abide
This last assault, dropped with the speed of fear
Towards the river. Like a winged spear.
Outstretching his long neck, rigid and straight,
Aimed at where Leda on the bank did wait
With open arms and kind, upUfted eyes
And voice of tender pity, down he flies.
Leda 17
Nearer, nearer, terribly swift, he sped
Directly at the queen ; then widely spread
Resisting wings, and breaking his descent
'Gainst his own wind, all speed and fury spent,
The great swan fluttered slowly down to rest
And sweet security on Leda's breast.
Menacingly the eagle wheeled above her ;
But Leda, like a noble-hearted lover
Keeping his child-beloved from tyrannous harm.
Stood o'er the swan and, with one slender arm
Imperiously lifted, waved away
The savage foe, still hungry for his prey.
Baffled at last, he mounted out of sight
And the sky was void — ^save for a single white
Swan's feather moulted from a harassed wing
That down, down, with a rhythmic balancing
From side to side dropped sleeping on the air.
Down, slowly down over that dazzling pair.
Whose different grace in union was a birth
Of unimagined beauty on the earth :
So lovely that the maidens standing round
Dared scarcely look. Couched on the flowery ground
Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
The swan's proud-arching opulent loveHness,
Stroking the snow-soft plumage of his breast
With fingers slowly drawn, themselves caressed
By the warm softness where they lingered, loth
To break away. Sometimes against their growth
Ruffling the feathers inlaid Hke little scales
On his sleek neck, the pointed finger-nails
Rasped on the warm, dry, puckered skin beneath ;
And feeUng it she shuddered, and her teeth
Grated on edge ; for there was something strange
And snake-like in the touch. He, in exchange,
\
I 8 Leda
Gave back to her, stretching his eager neck,
For every Hss a little amorous peck ;
Rubbing his silver head on her gold tresses,
And with the nip of horny dry caresses
Leaving upon her young white breast and cheek
And arms the red print of his playful beak.
Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim
Austerity of virginal flank and limb
His curved and florid beauty, till she felt
That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt
The bones and marrow of her strength away.
One lifted arm bent o'er her brow, she lay
With Kmbs relaxed, scarce breathing, deathly still ;
Save when a quick, involuntary thrill
Shook her sometimes with passing shudderings.
As though some hand had plucked the aching strings
Of life itself, tense with expectancy.
And over her the swan shook slowly free
The folded glory of his wings, and made
A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame
Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.
Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.
Then one sharp sdund, that might have been a cry
Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain.
Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again.
The Birth of God 19
THE BIRTH OF GOD
NIGHT is a void about me ; I lie alone ;
And water drips, like an idiot clicking his tongue,
Senselessly, ceaselessly, endlessly drips
Into the waiting silence, grown
Emptier for this small inhuman sound.
My love is gone, my love who is tender and young.
smooth warm body ! O passionate lips !
1 have stretched forth hands in the dark and nothing found
The silence is huge as the sky — I lie alone —
My narrow room, a darkness that knows no bound.
How shall I fill this measureless
Deep void that the taking away
Of a child's slim beauty has made ?
Slender she is and small, but the loneliness
She has left is a night no stars allay,
And I am cold and afraid.
Long, long ago, cut off from the wolfish pack,
From the warm, immediate touch of friends and mate,
Lost and alone, alone in the utter black
Of a forest night, some far-off, beast-like man,
Cowed by the cold indifferent hate
Of the northern silence, crouched in fear.
When through his bleared and suffering mind
20 Leda
A sudden tremor of comfort ran,
And the void was filled by a rushing wind,
And he breathed a sense of something friendly and near,
And in privation the life of God began.
Love, from your loss shall a god be born to fiU
The emptiness, where once you were, '
With friendly knowledge and more than a lover's will
To ease despair ?
Shall I feed longing with what it hungers after,
Seeing in earth and sea and air
A lovfer's smiles, hearing a lover's laughter,
Feeling love everywhere ?
The night drags on. Darkness and silence grow.
And with them my desire has grown.
My bitter need. Alas, I know,
I know that here I lie alone.
On Hampstead Heath 21
ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH
BENEATH the sunlight and blue of ail-but Autumn
The grass sleeps goldenly ; woodland and distant hiU
Shine through the gauzy air in a dust of golden poUen,
And even the glittering leaves are almost still.
Scattered on the grass, like a ragman's bundles carelessly dropped,
Men sleep outstretched or, sprawling, bask in the sun ;
Here glows a woman's bright dress and here a child is sitting,
And I lie down and am one of the sleepers, one
Like the rest of this tumbled crowd. Do they all, I wonder,
Feel anguish grow with the cahn day's slow decline.
Longing, as I, for a shattering wind, a passion
Of bodily pain to be the soul's anodyne ?
22 Leda
SYMPATHY
THE irony of being two . . . !
Grey eyes, wide open suddenly,
Regard me and enquire ; I see a face
Grave and unquiet in tenderness.
Heart-rending question of women — never answered
" Tell me, tell me, what are you thinking of ? "
Oh, the pain and fooUshness of love !
What can I do but make my old grimace,
Ending it with a kiss, as I always do ?
/
Male and Female Created He Them 23
MALE AND FEMALE CREATED
HE THEM
DIAPHENIA, drunk with sleep,
Drunk with pleasure, drunk with fatigue,
Feels her Corydon's fingers creep —
Ring-finger, middle finger, index, thumb —
Strummingly over the smooth sleek drum
Of her thorax.
Meanwhile Handel's Gigue
Turhs in Corydon's absent mind
To Yakka-Hoola.
She can find
No difference in the thrilling touch
Of one who, now, in everything
Is God-like. " Was there ever such
Passion as ours ? "
His pianoing
Gives place to simple arithmetic's
Simplest constatations : — six
Letters in Gneiss and three in Gnu :
Luncheon to-day cost three and two ;
In a year — ^he couldn't calculate
Three-sixty-five times thirty-eight.
Figuring with printless fingers on
Her living parchment.
" Corydon !
I faint, faint, faint at your dear touch.
Say, is it possible ... to love too much ? "
24 Leda
FROM THE PILLAR
SIMEON, the withered stylite,
Sat gloomily looking down
Upon each roof and skylight
In all the seething town.
And in every upp^ chamber,
On roofs, where the orange flowers
Make weary men remember
The perfume of long-dead hours,
He saw the wine-drenched riot
Of harlots and human beasts.
And how celestial quiet
Was shattered by their feasts.
The steam of fetid vices
From a thousand lupanars.
Like smoke of sacrifices,
Reeked up to the heedless stars.
And the saint from his high fastness
Of purity apart
Cursed them and their unchasteness,
And envied them in his heart.
Jonah 25
JONAH
A CREAM of phosphorescent light
Floats on the wash that to and fro
Slides round his feet — enough to show
Many a pendulous stalactite
Of naked mucus, whorls and wreaths
And huge festoons of mottled tripes
And smaller palpitating pipes
Through which a yeasty liquor seethes.
Seated upon the convex mound
Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays
And sings his canticles and hymns,
Making the hollow vault resound
God's goodness and mysterious ways.
Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.
26 Leda
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
SWAN, Swan,
Yesterday you were
The whitest of things in this dark winter.
To-day the snow has made of your plumes
An unwashed pocket handkercher,
An unwashed pocket handkercher . . .
" Lancashire, to Lancashire ! " —
Tune of the antique trains long ago :
Each summer holiday a milestone
Backwards, backwards : —
Tenby, Barmouth, and year by year
All the different hues of the sea,
Blue, green and blue.
But on this river of muddy jade
There swims a yellow swan,
And along the bank the snow lies dazlingly white.
A Melody by Scarlatti 27
A MELODY BY SCARLATTI
HOW clear under the trees,
How softly the music flows,
Rippling from one still pool to another
Into the lake of silence.
28 Leda
A SUNSET
OVER against the triumph and the closed-
Amber and green and rose —
Of this short day,
The pale ghost of the moon grows living-bright
Once more, as the last Hght
Ebbs slowly away.
Darkening the fringes of these western glories
The black phantasmagories
Of cloud advance
With noiseless footing — ^vague and villainous shapes,
Wrapped in their ragged fustian capes,
Of some grotesque romance.
But overhead where, Hke a pool between
Dark rocks, the sky is green '
And clear and deep.
Floats windlessly a cloud, with curving breast
Flushed by the fiery west.
In god-Hke sleep . . .
And in my mind opens a sudden door
That lets me see once more
A little room
With night beyond the window, chill and damp,
And one green-lighted lamp
Tempering the gloom,
While here within, close to me, touching me
(Even the memory
Of my desire
A Sunset '' 29
Shakes me like fear), you sit with scattered hair ;
And all your body bare
Before the fire
Is lapped about with rosy flame .... But still,
Here on the lonely hill,
I walk alone ;
Silvery green is the moon's lamp overhead,
The cloud sleeps warm and red.
And you are gone.
3© Leda
LIFE AND ART
YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure ,
You laugh with the bountiful earth
In its richness of summer treasure :
Where now are your flowers and your mirth ?
Petals and cadenced laughter,
Each in a dying fall,
Droop out of life ; and after
Is nothing ; they were all.
But we from the death of roses
That three suns perfume and gild
With a Idss, till the fourth discloses
A withered wreath, have distilled
The fulness of one rare phial,
Whose nimble life shall outrun
The circling shadow on the dial,
Outlast the tyrannous sun.
First Philosopher's Song 31
FIRST PHILOSOPHER'S SONG
A POOR degenerate from the ape,
Whose hands are four, whose tail's a Hmb,
I contemplate my flaccid shape
And know I may not rival him,
Save with my mind — a nimbler beast
Possessing a thousand sinewy tails,
A thousand hands, with which it scales.
Greedy of luscious truth, the greased
Poles and the coco palms of thought,
Thrids easily through the mangrove maze
Of metaphysics, walks the taut
Frail dangerous Uana ways
That Hnk across wide gulfs remote
Analogies between tree and tree ;
Outruns the hare, outhops the goat ;
Mind fabulous, mind sublime and free !
But oh, the sound of simian mirth !
Mind, issued from the monkey's womb.
Is still umbilical to earth,
Earth its home and earth its tomb.
3 2 Leda
SECOND PHILOSOPHER'S SONG
IF, O my Lesbia, I should commit,
Not fornication, dear, but suicide.
My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)
Would drift face upwards on the oily tide
With the other garbage, till it putrefied.
But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts
Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown —
Your maiden modesty would float face down,
And men would weep upon your hinder parts.
'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan
By which this best of worlds is wisely planned.
One law He made for woman, one for man :
We bow the head and do not understand.
Fifth Philosopher's Song 33
FIFTH PHILOSOPHER'S SONG
A MILLION million spermatozoa,
All of them alive :
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that biUion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne —
But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside !
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you'd quietly died I
34- Leda
NINTH PHILOSOPHER'S SONG
("^ OD'S in His Heaven : He never issues
jr (Wise Man !) to visit this v^orld of ours.
Unchecked the cancer gnav?s oiu tissues,
Stops to lick chops and then again devours.
Those find, who most delight to roam
'Mid castles of remotest Spain,
That there's, thank Heaven, no place like home ;
So they set out upon their travels again.
.Beauty for some provides escape.
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
And some to better worlds than this
Mount up on wings as frail and misty
As passion's aU-too-transient kiss
(Though afterwards — oh, omne animal triste !)
But I, too rational by half
To live but where I bodily am,
Can only do my best to laugh.
Can only sip my misery dram by dram.
Ninth Philosopher's Song 35
While happier mortals take to drink,
A dolorous dipsomaniac,
Fuddled with grief I sit and think.
Looking upon the bile when it is black.
Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor !
We'll pledge our Empire vast across the flood :
For Blood, as all men know, than Water's thicker.
But water's wider, thank the Lord, than Blood.
36 Leda
^ MORNING SCENE
LIGHT through the latticed blind 0^
Spans the dim intermediate space V,
With parallels of luminous dust ,
To gild a nuptial couch, where Goya's mind
Conceived those agonising hands, that hair
Scattered, and half a sunlit bosom bare,
And, imminently above thenj, a red face
Fixed in the imbecile earnestness of lust.
Verrey's 3 7
VERREY'S
HERE, every winter's night at eight,
Epicurus lies in state,
Two candles at his head and two
Candles at his feet. A few
Choice spirits watch beneath the vault
Of his dim chapel, where default
Of music fills the pregnant air
With subtler requiem and prayer
Than ever an organ wrought with notes
Spouted from its tubal throats.
Black Ethiopia's Holy Child,
The Cradled Bottle, breathes its mild
Meek spirit on the ravished nose.
The palate and the tongue of those
Who piously partake with me
Of this funereal agape.
3 8 Leda
FRASCATI'S
BUBBLE-BREASTED swells the dome
Of this my spiritual home,
From whose nave the chandeUer,
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 reveky ?
What songs ? What gongs ? What nameless rites ?
What gods like wooden stalagmites ?
What steam of blood or kidney pie ?
What blasts of Bantu melody ?
Ragtime.. . . . 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.
Fatigue 39
FATIGUE
THE mind has lost its Aristotelian elegance of shape : there is
only a darkness where bubbles and inconsequent balloons
float up to burst their luminous cheeks and vanish.
A woman with a basket on her head : a Chinese lantern quite
askew : the vague bright bulging of chemists' window bottles ; and
then in my ears the distant noise of a great river of people. And
phrases, phrases —
It is only a question of saddle-bags,
Stane Street and Gondibert,
Foals in Iceland (or was it Foals in aspic ?).
As that small reddish devil turns away with an insolent jut of his
hindquarters, I become aware that his curling pug's tail is an electric
bell-push. But that does not disquiet me so much as the sight of all
these polished statues twinkling with high lights and all of them
grotesque and all of them colossal.
40 Leda
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
,. >
THE machine is ready to start. The symbolic 'beasts grow resty,
curveting where they stand at their places in the great blue
circle of the year. The Showman's voice rings out. " Montez,
mesdames et messieurs, montez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram.
You will take the Scorpion. Yours, madame, is the Goat. As for
you there, blackguard boy, you must be content with the Fishes. , I
have allotted you the Virgin, mademoiselle." ..." PoUsson ! "
" Pardon, pardon. Evidemment, c'est le Sagittaire qu'on demande.
Ohe, les dards ! The rest must take what comes. The Twins shall
counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away we go,
away."
Ha, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep,
drink in the intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells
and rings. . . . sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every
rooted star ; sound of winds and seas and all the simmering miUions
of life. Mo-nng, singing ... so with a roar and a rush round we go
and round, for ever whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken
life and speed.
But I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our
roundabout, and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel
and sweating as he ^ ground, and grinding eternally. And when I
perceived that he was the author of all our speed and that the music
was of his making, that everything depended on his grinding wheel, I
thought I would like to get off. But we were going too fast.
Back Streets 41
BACK STREETS
BACK streets, gutters of stagnating darkness where men breathe
something that is not so much air as a kind of rarefied slime.
... I look back down the tunnelled darkness of a drain to where, at
the mouth, a broader, windier water-way glitters with the gay speed
and motion of sunlit life. But around all is dimly rotting ; and the
inhabitants are those squamous, phosphorescent creatures that dark-
ness and decay beget. Little men, sheathed tightly in clothes of an
exaggeratedly fashionable cheapness, hurry along the pavements,
jaunty and at the same time furtive. There "is a thin layer of slime
over all of them. And then there are the eyes of the women, with
their hard glitter that is only of the surface. They see acutely, but
in a glassy, superficial way, taking in the objects round them no
more than my western windows retain the imprint of the sunset
that enriches them.
Back streets, exhalations of a difficult puberty, I once lived on
the fringes of them.
42 Leda
LAST THINGS
THERE have been visions, dark in the minds of men, death and
corruption dancing across the secular abyss that separates
eternity from time to where sits the ineluctable judge, waiting, wait-
ing through the ages, and ponders all his predestinated decrees.
There will be judgment, and each, in an agony of shame, relw:tant
yet compelled, will turn his own accuser. For ^,
Tunc tua gesta noxia - -■if^'
Secreta quoque turpia
Videbunt mille millia
Virorum circumstantia.
There under the unwinking gaze of all the legions of just men
made perfect, the poor prisoner will uncover each dirty secret of his
heart, wiU act over again each shameful scene of his life. And those
eyes of saints and angels will shine impassively down upon his
beastliness, and to him, as he looks at their steady brilliance, they will
seem a million of little blazing loopholes slotted in the walls of hell.
Hildebert, this was your vision as you brooded over death and
judgment, hell and heaven, in your cloister, a thousand years ago.
Do you not envy us our peace of mind who know not four ultimates,
but only one ? For whom the first of the Last Things is also the last
— ^us, whom death annihilates with all our shame and all our folly,
leaving no trace behind.
Gothic 43
GOTHIC
SHARP spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling
bells. Reckless, breakneck, head over heels down an airy
spiral of stairs run the bells. " Upon Paul's steeple stands a tree."
Up again and then once more to the bottom, two steps at a time.
" As full of apples as can be."
Up again and down again : centuries of climbing have not worn
the crystal smoothnes?^f the degrees.
Along the bellying clouds the Uttle boys of London Town come
running, running as best they may, seeing that at every step they sink
ankle-deep through the woolly surface into the black heart of thunder
beneath.
The apples on the trees are swaying in the wind, rocking to the
clamour of beUs. The leaves are of bright green copper, and rattle
together with a scaly sound. At the roots of the tree sit four gargoyles
playing a little serious game with dice. The hunch-backed ape has
won from the manticore that crooked French crown with a hole in it
which the manticore got from the friar with the strawberry nose ; he
had it in turn as an alms frdm the grave knight who lies with crossed
legs down there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing,
where the great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and
stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas.
44 Leda
EVENING PARTY
" O ANS Espoir, sans Espoir ..." sang the lady while the piano
w[3 laboriously opened its box of gld-sardines in treacle. One
detected ptomaine in the syrup.
Sans Espoir ... I thought of the rhymes — soir, nonchaloir,
reposoir — ^the dying falls of a symboUsm grown sadly suicidal before
the broad Flemish back of the singer, the dewlaps of her audience.
Sans Espoir. The listeners wore the frozen rapture of those who
gaze upon the uplifted Host.
Catching one another's eye, we had a simultaneous vision of pgws,
of Lyenas and hyststj*'
Three candles were burning. They behaved like English aristo-
crats in a French novel — ^perfectly, impassively. I tried to imitate
their milordliness.
One of the candles flickered, snickered. Was it a draught or was
it laughter ?
Flickering, snickering — candles, you betrayed me. I had to
laugh too.
Beauty 45
BEAUTY
I
THERE is a sea somewhere — ^whether in the lampless crypts of the
earth, or among sunlit islands, or that which is an unfathom-
able and terrifying question between the archipelagos of stars — ^there
is a sea (and perhaps its tides have filled those green transparent pools
that glint like eyes in a spring storm-cloud) which is for ever troubled
and in travail — a bubbling and a heaving up of waters as though for
the birth of a fountain.
The sick and the crippled lie along the brims in expectation of
the miracle. And at last, at last . . .
A funnel of white water is twisted up and so stands, straight and
still by the very speed of its motion.
It drinks the light ; slowly it is infused with colour, rose and
mother-of-pearl. Slowly it takes shape, a heavenly body.
O dazzling Anadyomene !
The flakes of foam break into white birds about her head, fall
again in a soft avalanche of flowers. Perpetual miracle, beauty
endlessly born.
46 . Leda
II
STEAMERS, in all your travelling have you trailed the meshes of
your Idng expiring white nets across this sea, or dipped in it your
sliding rail, or balanced your shadow far far down upon its glass-green
sand ? Or, forgetting the preoccupations of commerce and the well-
oiled predestination of your machinery, did you ever put in at the real
Paphos i
Beauty 47
III
IN the city of Troy, whither our Argonautical voyages had carried us,
we found Helen and that lamentable Cressid who was to Chaucer
the feminine paradox, untenably fantastic but so devastatingly actual,
the crystal ideal — ^flawed ; and to Shakespeare the inevitable truU,
flayed to show her physiological machinery and the logical conclusion
of every the most heartrendingly ingenuous gesture of maidenhood.
(But, bless you ! our gorge doesn't rise. We are cynically well up
in the diamning Theory of woman, which makes it all the more amusing
to watch ourselves in the ecstatic practice of her. Unforeseen
perversity.)
Fabulous Helen ! At her firm breasts they used to mould delicate
drinking cups which made the sourest vinegar richly poisonous.
The geometry of her body had utterly outwitted EucHd, and the
Philosophers were baffled by curves of a subtlety infinitely more elusive
and Eleusinian than the most oracular speculations of Parmenides.
They did their best to make a coherent system out of the incompatible,
but empirically established, facts of her. Time, for instance, was
abolished within the circle of her arms. " It is eternity when her Kps
touch me," Paris had remarked. And yet this same Paris was mani-
festly and notoriously falling into a decline, had lost whatever sense
or beauty he once possessed, together with his memory and all skiU
in the nine arts which are memory's daughters. How was it then,
these perplexed philosophers wondered, that she could at one and the
same moment give eternity Uke a goddess, while she was vampiring
away with that divine thirsty mouth of hers the last dregs of a poor
mortal life ? They sought an insufficient refuge in Heraclitus' theory
of opposites.
48 Leda
Meanwhile Troilus was always to be found at sunset, pacing up
and down the walls by the western gate — quite mad. At dusk the
Greek camp-fires would blossom along Xanthus banks — one after
another, a myriad lights dancing in the dark.
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O'er heaven's pure azure spreads her something light.
He would repeat the simile to himself, but could never remember
the correct epithets. Not that they mattered — ^any more than
anything else.
Beauty 49
IV
THERE are fine cities in the world — Manhattan, Ecbatana and
Hecatompylus — but this city of Troy is the most fabulous of
them all, Rome was seven hills of butcher's meat, Athens an abstraction
of marble, in Alexandria the steam of kidney-puddings revolted the
coenobites, darkness and size render London inappreciable, Paris is
full of sparrows, the snow lies gritty on Berlin, Moscow has no veri-
simiHtude, all the East is peopled by masks and apes and larvae. But
this city of Troy is most of all real and fabulous with its charnel
beauty.
" Is not Helen the end of our search — ^paradisal Uttle World, symbol
and epitome of the Great ? Dawn sleeps in the transparent shadow
of roses within her ear. The stainless candour of infinity — ^far-off
peaks in summer and the Milky Way — ^has taken marvellous form in
her. The Little World has its meteors, too, comets and shadowy
clouds of hair, stars at whose glance men go planet-struck. Meteors
— ^yes, and history it has. ^ The past is still alive in the fragrance of her
hair, and her young body breathes forth memories as old as the
begiiming of life — ^Eros first of gods. In her is the goal. I rest here
with Helen."
" Fool," I said, " quote your Faustus. I go further."
50 Leda
FURTHER — but a hunclred Liliputian tethers prevent me, the
white nerves which tie soul to sHn. And the whole air is
aching with epidermical magnetism.
Further, tether. But Troy is the birthplace of my home-
sickness. Troy is more than a patriotism, for it is built of my very
flesh ; the remembrance of it is a fire that sticks and tears when I
would pull it off.
But further. One last look at Troilus where he stands by the
western gate, staring over the plain. Further. When I have learnt
the truth, I wiU return and build a new palace with domes less
ominously like breasts, and there I will invent a safer Helen and a less
paradoxical Cressid, and my harem wUl be a Ubrary for enlighten-
ment.
Beauty 5 1
VI
HERE are pagodas of diminishing bells. The leopard sleeps in
the depth of his rosy caverli, and when he breathes it is a
smell of irresistible sweetness ; in the bestiaries he is the symbol of
Christ in His sepulchre.
This listening conch has collected all the rumours of pantheism ;
the dew in this veined cup is the sacrament of nature, while these pale
thuribles worship in the dark with yellow lamps and incense.
Everywhere alchemical profusion — ^the golden mintage of glades
and ripples, vigils of passion enriched with silver under the fingers of
the moon ; everywhere lavishness, colour, music ; the smoothness of
machinery, incredible and fantastic ingenuities. God has lost his
half-hunter in the desert.
But we have not come to worship among these Gothic beeches,
for all their pillars and the lace-work of their green windows. We
are looking for other things than churches.
5 2 Leda
VII
TREES, the half-fossilised exuberances of a passionate life,
petrified fountains of intemperance — ^with their abolition
begins the realm of reason.
Geometry, lines and planes, smooth edges, the ordered horror of
perspectives. In this country there are pavements bright and sleek
as water. The walls are precipices to which giants have nailed a
perpetual cataract of marble. The fringes of the sky are scalloped
with a pattern of domes and minarets. At night, too, the down-
struck lamps are pyramids of phantom green and the perfect circle
they make upon the pavement is magical.
Look over the parapet of the Acropolis. The bridges go dizzily
down on their swaying catenaries, the giall's flight chained fast. The
walls drop clear into the valley, all the millions of basalt blocks calcined
into a single red monolith, fluted with thirstily shining organ pipes,
which seem for ever wet. There are no crevices for moss and toad-
flax, and even the claws of the yellow lichen slip on its polished
flanks.
The valley is aU paved and inlaid with rivers of steel. No trees,
for they have been abolished.
" Glorious unnature," cries the watcher at the parapet. His
voice launches into the abyss, following the curve of the bridges.
" Glorious unnature. We have triumphed."
But his laughter as it descends is like a flight of broken steps.
Beauty 53
VIII
LET us abandon ourselves to Time, which is beauty's essence. We
live among the perpetual degenerations of apotheoses. Sunset
dissolves into soft grey snow and the deep ocean of midnight, boundless
as forgetfulness or some yet undiscovered Pacific, contracts into the
green puddle of the dawn. The flowers burn to dust with their own
brightness. On the banks of ancient rivers stand the pitiful stumps
of huge towers and the ghosts of dead men straining to return into
life. The woods are full of the smell of tJ^ansience. Beauty, then,
is that moment of descent when apotheosis tilts its wings downwards
into the gulf. The ends of the curve lose themselves parabolically
somewhere in infinity. Our sentimental eyes see only the middle
section of this degeneration, knowing neither the upper nor the
lower extremes, which some have thought to meet, godhead and
annihilation.
Old Curiosity Shops ! If I have said " Mortality is beauty," it
was a weakness. The sense of time is a symptom of anaemia of the soul,
through which flows angelic ichor. We must escape from the dust
of the shop.
Cloistered darkness and sleep offer us their lotijses. Not to per-
fceive where all is ugly, eaten into by the syphilis of time, heart-
I sickening — ^this is beauty ; not to desire where death is the only con-
' summation — ^wisdom.
Night is a measureless deep silence : daybreak brings back the
foetid gutters of the town. O supreme beauty of a night that knows
no limitations — stars or the jagged edges of cock-crowing. Desperate,
my mind has desired it : never my blood, whose pulse is a rhythm of
the world.
54
Leda
At the other extreme, Beatrice lacks solidity, is as unresponsive to
your kisses as mathematics. She too is an oubliette, not a way of life ;
an oubliette that, admittedly, shoots you upwards into light, not
down to death ; but it comes to the same thing in the end.
What, then, is the common measure ? To take the world as it is,
but metaphorically, informing the chaos of nature with a soul, quali-
fying transience with eternity.
When flowers are thoughts, and lonely poplars fountains of aspiring
longing ; when our actions are the poem of which all geographies
and architectures and evefy science and all the unclassed individual
odds and ends are the words, when even Helen's white voluptuousness
matches some candour of the soul — ^theh it will have been found, the
permanent and living loveliness.
It is not a far-fetched, dear-bought gem ; no pomander to be
smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent ; it is not
a birth of rare oboes or vioUns, not visible only from ten to six by
state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an
ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, mediaeval
in its implication with the very threads of life. I desire no Paphian
cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common
Life, eating, drinking ; marrying and giving in marriage ; taking and
taken in adultery ; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling
immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating.
Arduous search for one who is chained by his desires to dead car-
cases, whose eyes are dimmed with tears by the slow heart-breaking
twilights full of old family ghosts laid in lavender, whose despair cries
out for opiate and anodyne, craving gross sleep or a place on the airy
unsupported pinnacles which hang in the sterile upper chambers of
ether.
Ventre k terre, head in air — ^your centaurs are your only poets.
Their hoofs strike sparks from the flints and they see both very near
and immensely far.
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 55
SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT
FOREWORD
JOHN RIDLEY, the subject of this poem, was killed in February
191 8. " 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 im-
mortality 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-delh for one's personal self ; one would have
first to beUeve 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 nimiber is always engaged, and the hne chroni-
cally out of order — ^weU, 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 khaH image, I beg. I'd
rather you simply said of me, as Erasmus did of his brother, ' Strenuus
compotor, nee 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
56 Leda
experience on the other " (I quote from Mr. Trotter's memorable work
on Herd Instinct), that characteristic instability which makes adol-
escence 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 coiirse, join it. " The greater part
must be content to be as though they had not been."
Soles Oqcidere et Redire Possunt 57
I
BETWEEN the drawing of the bKnd
And being aware of yet another day
There came to him behind
Close, pregnant eyehds, Kke 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,
58 Leda
Joining the ceilings to their floors,
And parallels ring wedding beUs
, 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 pxultant fear of desire, when hearts
Beat brokenly. He laid his hand on the latch —
And woke among his famiHar books and pictures ;
Real as his dream ? He wolidered. 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 tUl 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 aU
Unseizable confidence, the mystic Rose,
Could it but find the magical fall
That droops, droops and dies into the perfect close . .
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 59
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 hbraries 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, certaiiily 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 spine
(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 oflF.
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 vwth the ghost of the seven sips
One smacks for hiccoughs !
6o Leda
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 ?
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 6i
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 httle 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,
62 Leda
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 feUcity.
" 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 fulfiiUed them all.
But that was long ago, ah ! long ago.
Like the last horse bus, or the Christmas pantomime.
Or the Bellsi oh, the Bells, of Edgar Allan Poe.
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 63
III
" T T ELEN, your letter, proving, I suppose,
1 X 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 worb. Works ! — ^any fool
Can do them if he tries to ; but what school
Can teach one to <:redit 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 painfuUy.
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.
64 ' Leda
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)."
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 65
IV
OH, the maggots, the maggots in his brains !
Words, words and words.
A birth of rhymes and the strangest.
The most unlikely superfcetations —
New deep thoughts begot by a jingle upon a pun.
New worlds ghmpsed through the window of a word
That has ceased, somehow, to be opaque.
All the muses buzzing in his head.
Autobiography crystalHsed under his pen, thus :
" When I was young enough not to know youth,
I was a Faun whose loves were Byzantine
Among stiflE 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."
5
66 Leda
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.
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 67
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 WiU ? " " 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 ;
-B«t 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.
" WeU, 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.
68 Leda
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.
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 69
VI
THE crowd, the crowd — oh, he could ahnost 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 goiie
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 hke the moon shining through prison bars,
Visits the mind with madness. So they fly.
70 Leda
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 cafe 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.
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 71
VII
TWIN domes of the Alhambra,
Veiled tenderness of the sky above the Square :
He sat him down in the gardens, und^r 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 plgnes.
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 fooUsh 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.
72 Leda
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 sUk
About him, and the air was warm as milk
Against his sHn. Long sitting stiU 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 bUnd alley ; action, which at best
Is cudgelling water that goes back to rest
As soon as you give over your violences.
No, wisdom culls the flowers of the five senses,
Savouring the secret sweetness they afford :
Instead of which he had a Medical Board
Next week, and they would pass him fit. Good Lord !
Well, let all pass.
But one must outdo fate,
Wear clothes more modish than the fashion, run
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 73
Faster than time, not merely stand and wait ;
Do in a flash what cannot be undone
Through ten eternities. Predestinate ?
So would God be — that is, if there were one :
General epidemic which spoils nobody's fun.
Action, action ! Quickly rise and do
The most irreparable things ; beget,
In one brief consummation of the will, ^
Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.
Action ! This was no time for sitting stiU.
He crushed his hat down over his eyes
And walked with a stamp to symbolise
Action, action — ^left, right; left ;
Planting his feet with a slabby beat,
Taking strange Procrustean steps.
Lengthened, shortened to avoid
Touching the lines between the stones —
A thing which makes God so annoyed.
Action, action ! First of all
He spent three pounds he couldn't aflford
In buying a book he didn't want,
For the mere sake of having been
Irrevocably extravagant.
Then feeling very bold, he pressed
The bell of a chance house ; it might
Disclose some New Arabian Night
Behind its gri'^y busk, who knows ?
The seconds passed ; all was dead.
Arrogantly he rang once more.
His heart thumped on sheer silence ; but at last
There was a shuffling ; something behind the door
Became approaching panic, and he fled.
74 Leda
VIII
MISERY," he said, " to have no chin.
Nothing but brains and sex and taste
Only omissively to sin,
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.
But when the war is over,
I wiU go to the East and plant
T6a and rubber, and make much money.
I will eat the black sweat of niggers
And flagellate them with whips.
I shall be enormously myself,
Incarnate Chin."
The anguish of thinking ill of oneself
(St. Paul's religion, poignant beyond words)
Turns ere you know it to faint minor thirds
Before the ritualistic pomps of the world —
The glass-grey silver of rivers, silken skies unfurled,
Urim and Thummim of dawn and sun-setting,
^And the lawn sleeves of a great episcopal cloud,
Matins of song and vesperal murmuring.
Incense of night-long flowers and earth new-ploughed :
All beauties of sweetness and aU that shine or sing.
Consience is smoothed by beauty's subtle fingers
Into voluptuousness, where nothing lingers
Of bitterness, saving a sorrow that is
Rather a languor than a sense of pain.
So, from the tunnel of St. Martin's Lane
Sailing into the open Square, he felt
His self-reproach, his good resolutions melt
Into an ecstasy, gentle as bah^i.
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 75
Before the spire, etched black and white on the calm
Of a pale windless sky, St. Martin's spire.
And the shadows sleeping beneath the portico
And the crowd hurrying, ceaselessly, to and fro,
Alas, the bleached and slender tower that aches
Upon the gauzy sky, where blueness breaks
Into sweet hoarseness, veiled with love and tender
As the dove's voice alone in the woods : too slender,
Too finely pencilled — black and bleaching white
On smoky mist, too clear in the keen light
Of utmost summer : and oh ! the lives that pass
In one swift stream of .c olour , too, too bright,
Too swift — and all the lives unknown,
Alone,
Alas. . .
A truce to summer and beauty and the pain
Of being too consciously alive among
The things that pass and the things that remain,
(Oh, equal sadness !) the pain of being young.
Truce, truce. . . . Once again he fled ; —
AU his life, it seemed, was a flight ; —
Fled and found
Sanctuary in a cinema house.
Huge faces loomed and burst,
Like bubbles in a black wind.
He shut his eyes on them and in a little
Slept ; slept, while the pictures
Passed and returned, passed once more and returned.
And he, like God in the midst of the wheeHng world,
Slept on ; and when he woke it was eight o'clock.
Jenny ? Revenge is sweet ; he will have kept
Dear Jenny waiting.
76 Leda
IX
TALL straight poplars stand in a meadow ;
The wind and sun caress them, dappHng
The deep green grass with shine and shadow ;
And a little apart one slender sapling
Sways in the wind and almost seems
Conscious of its own supple grace,
And shakes its twin-hued leaves and gleams
With silvery laughter, filling the place
Where it stands with a sudden flash of human
Beauty and grace ; tiU from her tree
Steps forth the dryad, now turned woman,
And sways to meet him. It is she.
Food and drink, food and drink :
Olives as firm and sleek and green
As the breasts of a sea god's daughter,
Swimming far dovra where the corpses sink
Through the dense shadowy water.
Silver and black on flank and back.
The glossy sardine mourns its head.
The red anchovy and the beetroot red.
With carrots, build a gorgeous stair —
Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair —
And the green pallor of the salad round
Sharpens their clarion sound.
De lady take hors d'oeuvres ? and de gentleman too ?
Per due ! Due ! Echo answers : Du' . . .
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 77
" So, Jenny, you've found another Perfect Man."
" Perfect, perhaps ; but not so sweet as you.
Not such a baby." " Me ? A baby. Why,
I am older than the rocks on which I sit. . . ."
Oh, how deHghtful, talking about oneself !
Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive.
And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious :
Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live.
What though the mind still think that one thing's vicious
More than another ? If the thought can give
This wine's rich savour to our laughing kiss,
Let us preserve the Christian prejudice.
Oh, there are shynesses and silences,
Shynesses and silences !
But lucidly God also gave us wine.
" Jenny, adorable — " (what draws the line
At the mere word " love " ?) " has anyone the right
To look so lovely as you look to-night,
To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair ? "
But candidly, he wondered, do I care ?
He heard her voice and himself spoke,
But like faint light through a cloud of smoke.
There came, unreal and far away,
Mere sounds utterly empty — ^like the drone
Of prayers, cramhe re-petita, prayers and praise,
Long, long ago, in the .old School Chapel days ;
Senseless, but so intrusive on one's own
Interior life one couldn't even think . . .
O sweet, rare, perilous, retchy drink !
Another glass . , .
7 8 Leda
HOW cool is the moonless summer night, how sweet
After the noise and the dizzy choking heat !
The bloodless lamps look down upon their own
Green image in the polished roadway thrown,
And onward and out of sight the great road runs,
Smooth and dark as a river of cahn bronze.
Freedom and widening space : his life expands,
Ready, it seems, to burst the iron bands
Of self, to fuse with other lives and be
Not one but the world, no longer " I " but " She."
See, like the dolorous memory
Of happy times in misery.
An aged hansom fiUs the street
With the superannuated beat
Of hollow hoofs and beUs that chime
Out of another quieter time.
" Good-night," the last kiss, " and God bless you, my dear.'
So, she was gone, she who had been so near.
So breathing-warm — soft mouth and hands and hair —
A moment since. Had she been really there,
Close at his side, and had he kissed her ? It seemed
Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed
And talked about at breakfast, being a bore :
Improbable, unsubstantial, dim, yet more
Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt 79
Real than the rest of life ; real as the blaze
Of a sudden-seen picture, as the lightning phrase
With which the poet-gods strangely create
Their brief bright world beyond the reach of fate.
Yet he could wonder now if he had kissed
Her or his own loved thoughts. Did she exist
Now she was history and sifely stowed
Down in the past ? There (with a conscious smile),
There let her rest eternal. And meanwhile.
Lamp-fringed towards meeting parallels, the road
Stretched out and out, and the old weary horse,
Come from the past, went jogging his homeward course
Uphill through time to some demoded place.
On ghostly hoofs back to the safe Has-Been : —
But fact returns insistent as remorse ;
Uphill towards Hampstead, back to the year of grace
Nineteen hundred and seventeen.
8o Leda
B
XI
ETWEEN the drawing of the blind
And being aware of yet another day
FKINTBD BT MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11