The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 Read online

Riding to hounds

  Over the cow-pasture.

  Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

  And danced all the modern dances;

  And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,

  But they knew that it was modern.

  Upon the glazen shelves kept watch

  Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,

  The army of unalterable law.

  Mr. Apollinax

  LUCIAN

  When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States

  His laughter tinkled among the teacups.

  I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,

  And of Priapus in the shrubbery

  Gaping at the lady in the swing.

  In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Charming-Cheetah’s

  He laughed like an irresponsible fœtus.

  His laughter was submarine and profound

  Like the old man of the sea’s

  Hidden under coral islands

  Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,

  Dropping from fingers of surf.

  I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair

  Or grinning over a screen

  With seaweed in its hair.

  I heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the hard turf

  As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.

  ‘He is a charming man’ — ‘But after all what did he mean?’ —

  ‘His pointed ears…. He must be unbalanced.’ —

  ‘There was something he said that I might have challenged.’

  Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah

  I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.

  Hysteria

  As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden…’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

  Conversation Galante

  I observe: ‘Our sentimental friend the moon!

  Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)

  It may be Prester John’s balloon

  Or an old battered lantern hung aloft

  To light poor travellers to their distress.’

  She then: ‘How you digress!’

  And I then: ‘Someone frames upon the keys

  That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain

  The night and moonshine; music which we seize

  To body forth our own vacuity.’

  She then: ‘Does this refer to me?’

  ‘Oh no, it is I who am inane.

  ‘You, madam, are the eternal humorist,

  The eternal enemy of the absolute,

  Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!

  With your air indifferent and imperious

  At a stroke our mad poetics to confute —’

  And — ‘Are we then so serious?’

  La Figlia Che Piange

  O quam te memorem virgo …

  Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

  Lean on a garden urn —

  Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair —

  Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise —

  Fling them to the ground and turn

  With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:

  But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

  So I would have had him leave.

  So I would have had her stand and grieve,

  So he would have left

  As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,

  As the mind deserts the body it has used.

  I should find

  Some way incomparably light and deft,

  Some way we both should understand,

  Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

  She turned away, but with the autumn weather

  Compelled my imagination many days,

  Many days and many hours:

  Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

  And I wonder how they should have been together!

  I should have lost a gesture and a pose.

  Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

  The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

  POEMS

  1920

  Gerontion

  Thou hast nor youth nor age

  But as it were an after dinner sleep

  Dreaming of both.

  Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

  Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

  I was neither at the hot gates

  Nor fought in the warm rain

  Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

  Bitten by flies, fought.

  My house is a decayed house,

  And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,

  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

  Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

  The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

  Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

  The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

  Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

  I an old man,

  A dull head among windy spaces.

  Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’

  The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

  Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year

  Came Christ the tiger

  In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

  To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

  Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

  With caressing hands, at Limoges

  Who walked all night in the next room;

  By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;

  By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

  Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp

  Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles

  Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,

  An old man in a draughty house

  Under a windy knob.

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

  History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

  And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

  Guides us by vanities. Think now

  She gives when our attention is distracted

  And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

  That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

  What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

  In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

  Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

  Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

  Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

  Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

  Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

  These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

  The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last

  We have not reached conclusion, when I

  Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last

  I have not made this show purposelessly

  And it is not by any concitation

  Of the backward devils.

  I would meet you upon this honestly.

  I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

  To lose beauty in terror, ter
ror in inquisition.

  I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

  Since what is kept must be adulterated?

  I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

  How should I use them for your closer contact?

  These with a thousand small deliberations

  Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

  Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

  With pungent sauces, multiply variety

  In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,

  Suspend its operations, will the weevil

  Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled

  Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

  In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

  Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.

  White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

  And an old man driven by the Trades

  To a sleepy corner.

  Tenants of the house,

  Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

  Burbank with a Baedeker:

  Bleistein with a Cigar

  Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire — nil nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus — the gondola stopped, the old palace was there, how charming its grey and pink — goats and monkeys, with such hair too! — so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.

  Burbank crossed a little bridge

  Descending at a small hotel;

  Princess Volupine arrived,

  They were together, and he fell.

  Defunctive music under sea

  Passed seaward with the passing bell

  Slowly: the God Hercules

  Had left him, that had loved him well.

  The horses, under the axletree

  Beat up the dawn from Istria

  With even feet. Her shuttered barge

  Burned on the water all the day.

  But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

  A saggy bending of the knees

  And elbows, with the palms turned out,

  Chicago Semite Viennese.

  A lustreless protrusive eye

  Stares from the protozoic slime

  At a perspective of Canaletto.

  The smoky candle end of time

  Declines. On the Rialto once.

  The rats are underneath the piles.

  The Jew is underneath the lot.

  Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

  Princess Volupine extends

  A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand

  To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,

  She entertains Sir Ferdinand

  Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings

  And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?

  Thought Burbank, meditating on

  Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.

  Sweeney Erect

  And the trees about me,

  Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks

  Groan with continual surges; and behind me

  Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!

  Paint me a cavernous waste shore

  Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,

  Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks

  Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

  Display me Aeolus above

  Reviewing the insurgent gales

  Which tangle Ariadne’s hair

  And swell with haste the perjured sails.

  Morning stirs the feet and hands

  (Nausicaa and Polypheme).

  Gesture of orang-outang

  Rises from the sheets in steam.

  This withered root of knots of hair

  Slitted below and gashed with eyes,

  This oval O cropped out with teeth:

  The sickle motion from the thighs

  Jackknifes upward at the knees

  Then straightens out from heel to hip

  Pushing the framework of the bed

  And clawing at the pillow slip.

  Sweeney addressed full length to shave

  Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,

  Knows the female temperament

  And wipes the suds around his face.

  (The lengthened shadow of a man

  Is history, said Emerson

  Who had not seen the silhouette

  Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)

  Tests the razor on his leg

  Waiting until the shriek subsides.

  The epileptic on the bed

  Curves backward, clutching at her sides.

  The ladies of the corridor

  Find themselves involved, disgraced,

  Call witness to their principles

  And deprecate the lack of taste

  Observing that hysteria

  Might easily be misunderstood;

  Mrs. Turner intimates

  It does the house no sort of good.

  But Doris, towelled from the bath,

  Enters padding on broad feet,

  Bringing sal volatile

  And a glass of brandy neat.

  A Cooking Egg

  En l’an trentiesme de mon aage

  Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues …

  Pipit sate upright in her chair

  Some distance from where I was sitting;

  Views of Oxford Colleges

  Lay on the table, with the knitting.

  Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,

  Her grandfather and great great aunts,

  Supported on the mantelpiece

  An Invitation to the Dance.

  . . . . .

  I shall not want Honour in Heaven

  For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

  And have talk with Coriolanus

  And other heroes of that kidney.

  I shall not want Capital in Heaven

  For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond.

  We two shall lie together, lapt

  In a five per cent. Exchequer Bond.

  I shall not want Society in Heaven,

  Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;

  Her anecdotes will be more amusing