Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Poem Text
E.P. ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE
For three years, out of key with his time,He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start —
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born 5
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
. . . . . . . . . .
Caught in the unstopped ear; 10
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair 15
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an
trentuniesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem. 20
II
The age demanded an imageOf its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries 25
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
30 Made with no loss of time, 30
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
III
The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
the pianola “replaces” 35
Sappho’s barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel. 40
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
Even the Christian beauty 45
Defects — after Samothrace;
We see . . .
Decreed in the market place.
Faun’s flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint’s vision. 50
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Pisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch 55
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
. . . . . . . .
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon! 60
IV
These fought in any case,and some believing,
pro domo, in any case. . .Some quick to arm,
some for adventure, 65
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter; 70
Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor”. . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie, 75
home to many deceits,
home to old and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before. 80
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the days, 85
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth, 90
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books. 95
YEUX GLAUQUES
Gladstone was still respected,When John Ruskin produced
“Kings’ Treasuries”; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused.
Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice 100
When that faun’s head of hers
Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons
Have preserved her eyes; 105
Still, at the Tate, they teach
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin like brook-water,
With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born 110
In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same
Still darts out faunlike from the half-ruin’d face,
Questing and passive. . . .
“Ah, poor Jenny’s case” . . . 115
Bewildered that a world
Shows no surprise
At her last maquero’s
Adulteries.
“SIENA MI FE’; DISFECEMI MAREMMA”
Among the pickled fætuses and bottled bones, 120Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Galliffet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; 125
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub . . .
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed —
Tissue preserved — the pure mind 130
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the
Church.
So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood,” 135
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.
BRENNBAUM
The skylike limpid eyes, 140The circular infant’s face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty
years,
Showed only when the daylight fell 145
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable.”
MR. NIXON
In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yachtMr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with
fewer
Dangers of delay. “Consider 150
“Carefully the reviewer.
“I was as poor as you are;
“When I began I got, of course,
“Advance on royalties, fifty at first,” said Mr.
Nixon,
“Follow me, and take a column, 155
“Even if you have to work free.
“Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
“I rose in eighteen months;
“The hardest nut I had to crack
“Was Dr. Dundas. 160
“I never mentioned a man but with the view
“Of selling my own works.
“The tip’s a good one, as for literature
“It gives no man a sinecure.
“And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. 165
“And give up verse, my boy,
“There’s nothing in it.”
* * * *Likewise a friend of Blougram’s once advised me:
Don’t kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your game 170
And died, there’s nothing in it.
X
Beneath the sagging roofThe stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world’s welter 175
Nature receives him;
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions 180
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
XI
“Conservatrix of Milésien”Habits of mind and feeling, 185
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, “Milesian” is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her
Older than those her grandmother 190
Told her would fit her station.
XII
“Daphne with her thighs in bark“Stretches toward me her leafy hands,” —
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine’s commands, 195
Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value 200
Of Well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending 205
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,
A modulation toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution, 210
A possible friend and comforter.
* * * *
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished; 215
Besides this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
ENVOI (1919)
Go, dumb-born book, 220Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou has subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie, 225
And build her glories their longevity.
Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment, 230
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time. 235
Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers, 240
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Sifting on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone. 245
MAUBERLEY (1920)
“Vacuos exercet in aera morsus.”Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jacquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina: 250
“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert,”
And his tool
The engraver’s.
Firmness, 255
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;
Colourless
Pier Francesca, 260
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.
II
“Qu’est ce qu’ils savent de l’amour, et qu’est cequ’ils peuvent com-
prendre?
S’ils ne comprennent pas la poésie, s’ils ne 265
sentent pas la musique,
qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre de cette
passion en comparaison
avec laquelle la rose est grossière et le parfum des
violettes un
tonnerre?” CAID ALIFor three years, diabolus in the scale,
He drank ambrosia, 270
All passes, ANANGKE prevails,
Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.
He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,
Amid her galaxies,
NUKTIS’AGALMA 275
* * * *
Drifted . . . drifted precipitate
Asking time to be rid of . . .
Of his bewilderment; to designate
His new found orchid. . . .
To be certain . . . certain . . . 280
(Amid ærial flowers) . . . time for arrangements —
Drifted on
To the final estrangement;
Unable in the supervening blankness
To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff 285
Until he found his sieve . . .
Ultimately, his seismograph:
— Given that is his “fundamental passion,”
This urge to convey the relation
Of eye-lid and cheek-bone 290
By verbal manifestation;
To present the series
Of curious heads in medallion —
He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,
The wide-banded irides 295
And botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis;
Which anæsthesis, noted a year late,
And weighed, revealed his great affect,
(Orchid), mandate 300
Of Eros, a retrospect.
* * * *
Mouths biting empty air,
The still stone dogs,
Caught in metamorphosis, were
Left him as epilogues. 305
“THE AGE DEMANDED”
For this agility chance foundHim of all men, unfit
As the red-beaked steeds of
The Cytheræan for a chain bit.
The glow of porcelain 310
Brought no reforming sense
To his perception
Of the social inconsequence.
Thus, if her colour
Came against his gaze, 315
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze
He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate 320
Because this beauty had been.
The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand
Burst in upon the porcelain revery:
Impetuous troubling
Of his imagery. 325
Mildness, amid the neo-Nietzschean clatter,
His sense of graduations,
Quite out of place amid
Resistance to current exacerbations,
Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity 330
Gradually led him to the isolation
Which these presents place
Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.
By constant elimination
The manifest universe 335
Yielded an armour
Against utter consternation,
A Minoan undulation,
Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances
Strengthened him against 340
The discouraging doctrine of chances,
And his desire for survival,
Faint in the most strenuous moods,
Became an Olympian apathein
In the presence of selected perceptions. 345
A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,
The unexpected palms
Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge,
Left him delighted with the imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge, 350
Incapable of the least utterance or composition,
Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition,”
Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,
August attraction or concentration.
Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession, 355
Irresponse to human aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial manna,
Lifting the faint susurrus
Of his subjective hosannah. 360
Ultimate affronts to
Human redundancies;
Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters”
Leading, as he well knew,
To his final 365
Exclusion from the world of letters.
IV
Scattered MoluccasNot knowing, day to day,
The first day’s end, in the next noon;
The placid water 370
Unbroken by the Simoon;
Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns,
Tawn fore-shores
Washed in the cobalt of oblivions; 375
Or through dawn-mist
The grey and roseOf the juridical
Flamingoes;
A consciousness disjunct, 380
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of intermittences;
Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforecasted beach; 385
Then on an oar
Read this:
“I was
“And I no more exist;
“Here drifted 390
“An hedonist.”
MEDALLION
Luini in porcelain!The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano. 395
The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.
Honey-red, closing the face-oval, 400
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they
were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber,
The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as, 405
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.
