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Title: Aquarium
Author: Harold Acton
Release Date: March 25, 2019 [EBook #59125]
[Last updated: February 20, 2022]
Language: English
Character set encoding: iso-8859-1
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[1]
AQUARIUM
[2]
Uniform with this volume.
BUCOLIC COMEDIES. By Edith Sitwell.
[3]
AQUARIUM
BY
HAROLD ACTON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON
[4]
First published in 1923.
All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London.
| Part I |
| CURVES |
| | PAGE |
| Aquarium | 9 |
| A Day Will Come | 10 |
| Cathedral Interior | 14 |
| Young Sailor | 15 |
| Nights | 16 |
| i. Mimi at the Cabaret Vert | 16 |
| ii. Malaguenas | 17 |
| Confetti | 18 |
| Night of Adolescence | 19 |
| Conversazione of Musical Instruments | 20 |
| Paradise Villas | 32 |
| A Morality | 33 |
| My House | 36 |
| Sonnet | 37 |
| Oh! what have I to do with Thee? | 38 |
| Fox-Trot | 39 |
| ...... | 40 |
| Escape | 41 |
| Pink Night | 42 |
| Hope | 43[6] |
| Pastorale | 44 |
| Bal Saturnien | 45 |
| For a Viola-da-gamba | 46 |
| Contrasts | 47 |
| The Pensile Gardens of Babylon | 49 |
| |
| Part II |
| URBANITIES |
| Sabbath Morning Rain | 53 |
| A Window Speaks | 54 |
| Seven to Bed | 57 |
| Town Typing Office | 58 |
| Coiffeur Choréographique | 59 |
| L’Impératrice des Pagodes | 60 |
| Miss Fay the Trapezist | 62 |
| Sotie | 63 |
| Mr. Bedlam’s Sunday Breakfast | 64 |
Thanks are due to the Editors of the Spectator, New
Witness, Oxford Chronicle and Eton Candle for permission
to reprint certain of these poems.
[8]
IF you would view, buy tickets at the door.
Your brain for lucre please! the fishes here
Require some effort on your part, no more,
For comprehension; then the water’s clear
And you will see, dimpling in hyaline
Fish, oval, strange, glitter as rubied wine
In crystal goblets; fish with spotted gills,
Great flower-fish like open daffodils,
Pale fish that float with mellow, morbid eyes,
Dark fish that feed on wings of dragon flies,
Fish fulvid and fugacious, hovering
Amongst the silver cress with carmine wing,
And fish with small reticulated scales
Floundering mazed, with iridescent tails
Diaphanously quivering ...
Mad, necrophilic urchins cleft to trees
Of coral, with a sting as keen as bees
When they would kiss you; fish electrical
And fish with poniards, fierce, inimical,
Red fish that bark like mastiffs at the moon,
Blue limpets, purple jellies, fish that croon
Mauve, melancholy melodies, and fish
To suit your mood, good reader, as you wish!
THE ultimate experiment performed
To reach the planes of Mars and Jupiter
Without discomfort. First-class passengers
With restaurants and Adam sitting rooms,
Bathing and barbers, bars American
Could while away the slowly-dripping time.
Blast-furnaces and gasometers, yards
Of bulky timber-joists and refuse-heaps,
Pitch, cataclysmic mounds of dross and slag,
Deep yawning pits, the seething pores of Hell,
Slim towers of factories, vertiginous,
Soul-traps to vitiate and brutalize,
To mould men bitter and recalcitrant ...
The foul miasma of this atmosphere
Confabulate in retching multitudes.
In tension rapt, awaiting holocausts;
Mephitic and fuliginous, the sky—
Where green and yellow lights like demon’s eyes
Blink through the murk; ideas as microbes flock
Half-garrotted; they struggle: “Air, more air!”
Spasmodic; then neurotically grasp
A semi-groan before the strangulation.
The hooters blare
through air ...
And women sigh
near by,
For husbands thrash;
they lash
[11]
Gnarled, purple stripes.
Oh Cripes!
To bear a child
is mild
Compared to it,
a pit
Of Hell is sweet,
the heat
Is soothing, calm
as balm.
For what is home?
a tomb,
And men but wive
to thrive;
In hope they live
to give
Despair or worse,
to curse
The squalid life
of wife
With travail fraught,
distraught.
The hooters blare
through air ...
Obese black columns oscillate the streets.
The hands troop out into the twilit hour
Like billion-herded emmets, dinosaurs
That crawl with crude disaster in their souls.
There; poised above, a lemon-rind of moon
Recalls a youth of twitterings, desires
For nacreous, warm flesh. Oh God! that life
Should filter so through factory machines.
[12]
The ancient recrudescence; slowly-healed
Wounds all unripped in agony again.
Some lips are taut in bloodless nudity:
Are they enhungered for the limbs of dead?
No; they have savoured lust till they were lax
Of mind and body, with no palate for it
For smooth, white thighs and hot, fierce mouths they feel
Naught else than heavy-lidded lassitude.
All of a sudden voices rend the streets;
“Comrades, away! The spring is calling, haste
Ere we tear moon and stars from out the sky!”
The echoes give them courage, and the town
Becomes an archipelago of cries.
Men hop and run as little children run
Pink-naked on a curling yellow beach.
The women gaze from doorsteps, gorgon-eyed
And wonder what strange madness troubles them.
Sir Simon Moss, reclining in a chair,
With stout cigar held firm by regular
Well-ordered tusks of tooth, can hear the noise.
Another war? to reap more profits in
Exceeded mortal fortune. Nay; there blazed
Some sorry plague. Perhaps the rabies gript ’em.
Thus he pursues his reading of The Times.
Shrill voices fade, as stars in polychrome
Fade on the cold, grey atmosphere of dawn.
“Comrades, away! the smack of wind is sweet”
Faint as the whisper of dim violins.
“Comrades, away ...” faint as the autumn leaves
(Burnt paper crackling gently on the breeze).
[13]
And houses humped like elephants asleep,
Insolent hulks out-sprawled on many miles,
That muffled women’s sobs; for anxiously
They feared the sons would follow in their wake.
And the sons followed; far away, the hills
Exhaled a ripe, new life where no machines
Might pound away the frailly-cobwebbed air.
To casual mossy stones and thistle weeds
The city crumbled; now its walls lie bare
As lidless eyes for crows to peck at them.
And in the sloe-gin heat of summer days
The sky’s enamel is not quite Limoges
But almost; here and there a tiny scratch
Of soaring bird, some swallow on the wing
Does irritate the surface. Sheer below,
Fierce-biting on the edges, rise the trees;
Their taper-blossoms opulently lit
As girandoles that smoulder silently
Blue dust of incense; kohl-eyed evening
Sponges the face with dripping fragrances.
The vines and olives terraced on the hills
Melt on the dean horizon blurringly,
Where clouds descend in deluge, liquid-gold.
The flies fling flashes on cerulean meres
Where steely bream and roach with rosy fins
Goggle amongst the shrubberies of cress
Half-dizzied by their vacant harmonies.
The fruit of the wild gourd or hellebore
Has tranced die sense of man; die moonlight leaks
In silver puddles on the carpet-lawns.
Dry thud of hooves; the satyrs have returned!
THE pear-shaped saffron candle-flames
Leap in the velvet-bosomed dark,
The priest speaks gently of God’s claims
To wistful folk with coughs that bark.
Here all is hushed and rabbit-still,
The bull-necked columns, numb with gout
Of countless ages by God’s will
Cast crêpe-like shadows long and stout.
Two narrow slits of coloured glass
Are pierced by spears of mellow light,
The only light allowed to pass
Into this consecrated night.
Behind a candelabra droops
A crucifix of burnished gold,
A ray of dancing sunbeams swoops
Across the cobwebbed arches old.
Here may the sick, the bleeding one
Nurture his wounds and calm his fears.
Here when their joy in life is done
Poor, crumbling men gulp salty tears.
And knotted fingers counting beads,
And prayers half-whispered never cease.
Man slumbers; only heaven heeds,
Here in this hollow womb of peace.
DRUNK with the whiffs of steak in passage-ways,
With many a genial bar and kindly scene
Of sickly shrimps illumined by the rays
Of rose acetylene,
He wandered through the streets with empty maw;
And winter nights are raw.
And through a steaming window he could see
A saw-dust restaurant; a woman there
Was seated on an ancient lecher’s knee
With hat askew and hair
In blondine-tendrils falling Flora-wise
Over her blinking eyes.
Her lips like currants glistened and her arms
Sticky with strange narcotics, downy-white.
The elder pinched them, sucking in their charms
With pudgy fingers tight,
And of a sudden pealed behind her scarf
A clear, metallic laugh.
The youth outside relit his cigarette—
In silence longed for love articulate,
But he could watch no longer, for the sweat
Trickled a-down his pate
And stung his eyes; and what could be attained
When wages all were drained?
I. Mimi at the Cabaret Vert
MIMI la Brunette, each crimson evening
sways her silver serpent arms,
peals in half falsetto notes,
at the Cabaret Vert
And with greedy eyes the coarse-lipped men internally undress her.
But I sit crumpled by a marble-breasted table,
the curacoa is vitriol to my chapped, dry lips.
I see through Mimi—I see through her tragedies
and I see through the subtle cosmetics
of her tired face.
(She bore a still-born bastard once,
the man she loves, a black-eyed corporal
has shell-shock and nigh throttled her in bed).
And Mimi la Brunette, each crimson evening
peals in half falsetto notes,
sways her silver serpent arms
at the Cabaret Vert.
[17]
II. Malaguenas
BODY erect and arm defiantly curved,
she flings small steps to the clack of her castanets,
which snap their rhythm at one, more musical
than the slight scrape of the plectrum on mandoline strings.
She turns and yet so slowly, so haughtily ...
I wonder if she is an Empress masquerading
in this dim-lighted, ill-reputed café.
Click and the rhythm swims to Pedro’s head,
whose features contain the lineaments of appreciation.
Clack and the rhythm swims to Sancha’s head.
Whom then shall she favour with a rose?
Perhaps she will give no look, but flicker
flicker for a moment the darkness of her eyelids
and freeze the heart in Pedro’s body beating.
The rhythm ceases; Pedro is not the favoured one.
A gleam of dagger and muffled fall of a body.
LET us sprinkle in the air
Colours, colours everywhere.
Peacock’s eyes in April showers
Plucked in silver-sandalled hours,
Wings of fireflies iridescent,
Jets of drift-wood incandescent.
Let us hurl them to the skies
Ere the pallid dawn arise.
Minion jewel-plumaged birds,
Specks and flecks in dappled herds,
Tangle in your moonlit hair
Whilst you’re smiling unaware.
In the paper fluttering
Pipe-like voices seem to sing,
Little flutes of heron bone,
Tremulously soft in tone
As by eerie wizards played,
Make one wonder, half afraid.
Empty trickle of the breeze
Through the perfumed orangeries
Like a tiptoe of a faun,
Come a-heralding the dawn.
Let us sprinkle in the air
Colours, colours everywhere.
[19]
Night of Adolescence
STEEL-COLD without; sheer icicles of air
That hang down perpendicular with blades,
Chimeric poniards, vitrine points of ice
To freeze the spirituous tissues numb.
But in this throbbing, warmly-bosomed room
I sit and drink the fumes of glowing coals,
Allow my limbs to spread in languid ease,
Relaxing as a selfish, pensive cat,
Absorbing warmth into my seething pores
And drowning in a mass of phantom breasts....
The kettle bubbles humanly and croons
A far-off, distance-faded lullaby,
And I forget those frozen stalactites,
Those gushing waterfalls of winter wind,
That sap the brain and turn the blood to snow
Until I suck my breath in sudden gasps.
Within, the heat is curdling into flesh,
Vague, supple limbs to weave a night of lust
And throats lain back to kiss at my desire
White, soft and curving, I may nibble then
Such mad caresses as will flay my lips.
Those tender tendrils curling on the nape
Are coils of anaconda for my hands
To twine in subtly inspissated shapes
To my own delectation; and those eyes
Resign like perfumed stars to my caress.
[20]
Conversazione of Musical Instruments
Overture
IN the nebular effects of cigarette smoke,
The eyes may be closed heavy or drowsing open,
The iris drugged by the wine and the women,
White arms, mouths of carmine, ankles so slender
You might fear that they would snap candy-wise.
In the nebular effects of cigarette smoke,
Through the various hemispheres the eye turns,
One of us is breathing out rhythms
For the gratification of an audience.
Animated in the hum of conversation,
We achieve miracles.
When the veneer is shed and the heart lain bare
We turn men’s thoughts to Heaven or to Hell—
Cathedral Altar or the Brothel couch.
Though it be in the nebular effects of cigarette smoke
And the eyes may be closed heavy or drowsing open,
The ear-drums beat electric-nimble
And the brain is their poor prone prisoner,
When we breathe out our rhythms.
[21]
I
String Instruments
A phosphorescent butterfly
I creep into the hair
Of those who are aware
That I divinely flutter by.
Or I’m a vinous liquor spirting bright
Shivers of splintered glass into the night,
Or shimmering I skate
Where lovers celebrate
The hour their captive passions, cooped with bars,
Were freed, uncrumpled shirts beneath the stars—
(Pale, weary breaths of paille-de-riz
The corsage of Semiramis).
My notes are aromatic traceries
Wherewith I swing my perfume through the trees
Fiercely exotic; fading on the breeze
Until my respiration fails
And what was ambergris
Melts now to liquorice.
I stagger on the air
With all my plumage bare,
A galleon bereft of sails.
Or I can be as vulgar as a music-hall in Paraguay,
And I can jig and jig away
To cynically flirt
With sentimental dirt;
[22]
Veneered as candied peel,
Or gilded fruit, I reel
Into a singing cabaret.
For there in my proximity
They listen to my creed,
(And so I do not need
To preach my own sublimity).
I imitate the flavour of vanille
To give distinguished patronage the chill,
And I can give neuralgia,
Hysterics and nostalgia
To counterfeit the gardens of Seville.
I can creak as any sparrow
Which pricks the curve
Of every nerve
With a throstle sharp and narrow.
And I can be as raucous as
A golden-spotted jaguar
And I can be as glaucous as
The trees in Nicaragua.
Drink in my subtle melodies,
My chartreuse-tinted threnodies....
Violoncello (known more popularly as
the ’cello to rhyme with mellow-yellow)
I am the waxen fruit of instruments;
I drone till beads of perspiration break
Upon the foreheads of my audience.
I swell tumultuous; my dullard sounds
Ebb platitudes in doleful indigo.
[23]
Voluptuously blatant in my greed,
I am the woman garbed in heliotrope,
Whose bustle panics peacocks in the park.
Some take my mellow notes for rosaries—
So holy, steadfast, pure they seem to be.
(Like dear Prince Albert on a promenade,
Inspired apostle of the simple life,
With all his homely virtues on parade).
And I am music’s Edinburgh rock,
A laxative caressing to the ear,
A sanitary purge unto the sense;
A sentimental background in the life
Of modest daughter and domestic wife.
Chorus of Guitar and Mandoline
I snatch the silence whimpering
(Nocturnal perfumes make me sneeze)
My nostrils twitch; I snap the air,
I twang along the cardboard breeze.
I jump and rattle,
Reel and prattle
In Andalusian orangeries.
Now an elegant fandango,
Now a lithe and lissome tango,
Then I swoop like a flamingo
On a juicy-breasted mango
Hidden in the noisy leafage of the Guadalquivir.
Drips of dear ineffectual water,
April showers of pallid arsenic evaporating to unsubstantial air,
[24]
I once melted the heart of Cuchulain and his warriors
And Tom Moore grew quite sentimental about me in Tara’s halls,
Where my ripply waves of watery sounds
Turned to thin strips of paper on the breeze.
Now I can faint but to transparent moons
And the intensified weariness of stars.
I can whimper the same faded melodies
With their aroma of blurred cinnamon.
But the warriors have tired of listening,
For the Trocaderos call them with their Coon jazz-bands.
I strut with wicked tiger-eyes
Beware! Beware!
Bubbles of rubied flame arise
When villain gloats or hero dies
’Tis I am there.
When the last-breathed cry is uttered,
When the ghastly raven’s fluttered.
And the scoundrel’s curse is muttered
Beware! beware!
’Tis I am there.
I am a draught from an envenomed winepress
Low-humming ere the thud and thunderstorm—
And then at nightfall I decline, subsiding.
My flames will flicker out into the starlight
And I shall scoop into the dome of darkness
A filmy vault of crystallising silver.
[25]
Little bells on golden strings,
Little, glittering, glassy things,
Frail humming-birds with freckled wings....
Marionettes
And Pirouettes
And steel-arpeggio flutterings.
With my music-box precision
I can conjure up a vision
Of nurseries and unicorns
And silver cows with crumpled horns,
Of daisies and forget-me-nots,
Of cherry-jam and coffee-pots,
Perpetual kaleidoscopes
Of jumping-jacks and skipping ropes.
I chatter for eternity,
So help yourself to China tea!
Kiddy, Oh ma honey
Are you giddy for a song
Or a run for your money?
For I’ll buzz you one along
For I’m tin and string and wire
And wire and string and tin,
I can tang a tune for hire;
I can thump until I’m thin.
[26]
Gee! I’ll strut a juicy fox-trot
(Lilly-oh ma loo, ma loo)
Or a Coon’s banana cakewalk
(Come and kiss me, ducky, do!).
(A vision of red-mouths, outthrust bellies in a leafy
créme-de-menthe tropic.)
Wind Instruments
I am the brawny man without a brain
Who yawns a heartfelt music mournfully.
The military orchestra reveres
My manliness. Each Sunday afternoon
I lead in the Gaillard-Apothéose.
For I exude no poignant, fevered sounds
And yet I have my share of sentiment.
The soldier boy who perished by his will
For King and Country’s call, I represent.
I stand for honour, bravery’s my spouse
And that I swear’s no enviable rôle—
My sounds lack pepper often when they seem
To fall in relaxation on a couch,
But hold my player culpable for that;
Confiteor! I know I have defects;
But do not grudge me my solidity!
The descendant of that reed
The shepherds played in Attica,
Drowsing to the indolence of their brown bodies,
[27]
I peck the eyes of silence
With the vulture-beak of my primeval harshness.
Yet the high keys of an organ
Are rivals lean to mine,
Sonorous in primitive ingenuities
Which blister the most Wagnerian cynics
[1]With their clear-dropping, honey-comb dripping notes.
For you expect in flurry cohorts
The bees to swarm out “zoo-oom, zoo-oom”
Scything the phosphorescence on this air
Of agate-carved medallions,
Where all are statuettes from Tanagra.
The turbid air is buttered over now
With streaks of marbled stillness, as the prow
Of some deserted galleon; then I,
A pennon floating down the jagged sky,
Dissolve the butter with a single blast
Until the quiet falls, a broken mast
Like giant hail that thrashes on the leads
I paralyse and rip the air to shreds,
I flash my sparks of forest-powdering noise;
The formidable fanfares that I poise,
Ominous heralds of catastrophe,
As grapes of cloudy vintage on a sea
Purple and swollen, lecherous for thirst,
That wait until the thunderclaps, then burst.
When calm is ravished and I make retreat
Still throbs the air, still fevered temples beat....
[28]
I trumpet orange clear and strong
And then I falter in my song,
My breath falls stertorous when I climb,
My notes are sudden-shivery in the ankles.
Fierce red I turn, but like a blurry prism
Half-red, half-yellow, sinewy I grip
With potent gums onto the banister
Of music.
My notes call often desperate retreats
From battle-fields corpse-rich, still dear, still strong,
More passionate than grief, fevered than hatred,
Still dear, still strong, I wail a-down the breeze—
Which raises a poignant odour of putrefaction.
Though sharp
I ne-
ver harp
Upon
My clear-
ness like
A fear-
ful bird.
My fresh
And pier-
cing mesh
Of notes
Entrap
The sense
And lap
The mind.
[29]
I re-
present
The light
Of moon
In night
Of June.
A sea
Of scent
From wood-
land vine
I could
Define
With clear-
ness like
A fear-
ful bird.
Percussion
Arrows glitter through the air,
Wherewith, we, plumed of dappled rainbows,
Ravage quiet.
Shrilly shimmering, we whizz, hiss,
Thrash our eruptions volcanic,
Clattering into scythes
Which pierce the lead-of-air.
Our arrogant syncopations become
Bright sunflowers of steel waxing gigantical,
Then, more animated, clash; there....
Have two suns collided?
And tell me has the curtain been pulled down?
[30]
Men go to be murdered like innocent lambs
At the slaughter-house, gentle as beeves or as hams.
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
They are singing away, they are singing away,
They are bidding farewell to the realms of the day ...
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
And look at all the faces at the windows peering out!
The bonny lads are going to war, “Hurray! hurray!” they shout,
“The bonny boys, Hurray! Hurray!
They look so happy and so gay!”
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
Some are going to their funerals: I roll with bloodshot eyes.
Some are going to a land of death and never to arise.
Except to sing a “Glory, Hallelujah” to the King
And dance around his throne of gold and warble in a ring—
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
The fields of France will run in little rivers of their blood
And a few, all gashed and gory, will be sprawling in the mud.
Some are going to a land of death, and never to arise,
Some are going to their funerals; I roll with bloodshot eyes—
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
[31]
And their lithe and youthful bodies will be broken mannequins
That the Doctors will be cutting, and the bandages and pins
Will take the place of cockroaches and rats with pinkish eyes
And the lice that suck the blood of every soldier ere he dies.
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
And I persuade the sceptic that he’s fighting for a cause
“To fight for Right with all his Might” with fang and tooth and claws,
When I’m rolling he forgets the facts and thinks of youth and glory
And forgets that if he does return he’ll tell another story.
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum! (bis).
LIMBS metal-cold and gorgon eyes
With nude enamelled mouth, she lies
Within a vibrant, moaning gloom,
Awaiting canker and the tomb.
And through a shifting polka-light
A clock ticks and the hours take flight,
Brown undertakers drag their feet,
Well drilled to harden at defeat.
One crumpled man with pale, thin hands
To hide his face and sorrow, stands.
With systole, a calm on all,
Diastole, they bear the pall.
A strangled sob. (What shakes the floor?)
The undertakers slam the door.
The orange sashes of the sun
Revolve to blood in unison.
[33]
A Morality, or the Twelve Forces of Nature
Enchained
THE forest leaves dropped manna on the ground,
Pure amber trailed from ev’ry twining bough,
From flow’r to flow’r the comfortable sound
Of bees would echo mauvely, whilst the plough
Would print his dull design
On undulating hill
And from the rifted rocks
Clear honey would distil.
The heifer overfed on spicy herbs
And so his breath was perfume on the air.
The frisking antelope, unwilling, curbs
Abnormal appetite; he wanders there
With mouth all rosy-stained
From cropping purple meads,
As any parrot’s bill
Or pomegranate seeds.
And, as a multitude of dancing stars,
Bright, pearly dew shone tremulous in grass
Of bladed scimitars that threatened wars
On any prying mortal that would pass.
For only folk with hooves,
The Centaurs’ company,
Had leave to sojourn here—
The Titans’ empery.
The mountains lost their foreheads in the clouds;
The saffron-wingèd manticor of day,
[34]
As constellations glimmered from their shrouds,
Had taken sudden fear and flown away.
On fallen blossoms stretched
Beneath ten mango groves
One Titan slept and snored
With nostrils wide as stoves.
Caparisoned in trappings massy gold,
Six Titanesses, heaped on mammoths, ride,
That grunt beneath their weight until they scold
And lacerate each fibrous, knotted hide.
The mountains tremble now,
And cedars spin like tops,
The satyrs hide in caves
Until the thudding stops.
Theia dismounted from her mammoth first,
Adjusting pince-nez, angrily she cried:
“May nephew Zeus, ignoble and accurst,
In anguish die with will unsatisfied!”
The Titans moved their limbs—
Reverberant for miles.
The moonlight chequered lawns
Seemed sprayed with dimpled smiles.
Immediate attack upon the gods
Was counselled now, for Kronos’ fevered ire
Was kindled iron-white; the fiercest rods
Could not avenge indignities so dire.
All chaos now released—
The giants hundred-armed
Shall take them prisoners
Frustrated and alarmed.
[35]
The octopus, the dolphin and the whale
Bewildered, seek the bottom of the sea,
Where coral tree-tops clatter in the gale
And frighten mermaids sipping at their tea.
For even here, where peace
And periwinkles dwell,
Those bursts of gas and steam
Jar shrill as booths in hell.
The Titans, when they cough, engender squalls;
Their energy is not consumed by age.
They’d like to stretch their arms and shake St. Paul’s,
But they’re entrapped as mice within a cage.
And none to pity these,
Now bound in sorry plight,
Who played piquet with stars
And shuffled them at night!
THERE is a place of dim, familiar things,
Of contacts vaguely subtle to the touch—
I call it home; in my imaginings
Each detail is of value overmuch.
There is a place where every little nook,
And every cupboard with its special smell,
Are clear upon my mind as in a book,
I love it with a love that’s hard to tell.
There is a garden too where essences
Of flowers queerly mingle in the air,
And butterflies, strange iridescences,
Flutter about when evening enters there.
MY soul is flailed by myriad little whips
That sweetly sting my tender thoughts, but yet
There comes a time when I would fain forget
The small red cruelty that’s in your lips.
Forget your eyes, that ferret me from sleep,
And, if no power can help me from above,
I’ll beat your slender body into love
And bruise your silken throat until you weep.
In violence is love omnipotent—
The subtlest is the fiercely-bitten kiss
That purity and passion interweaves
Until we never know what life has meant
And wait for the supremity of bliss—
The silent thunder floating in the leaves.
[38]
Oh! what have I to do with Thee?
OH what have I to do with thee,
Thou pallid, pallid crucifix?
My sins are past all memory,
My soul fit only for the Styx.
Oh what have I to do with thee,
Hanging so limp and stark and cold?
To whom the world in revelry
Looks up ere quickly it grows old.
Oh what have I to do with thee?
The bloody sweat from off thy brow
Bears witness of thy death for me,
Who am so thankless to thee now.
Oh what have I to do with thee,
Thou death-pale Christ still fresh with youth,
Drooping thy head in agony
And anguish for the name of truth?
Oh what have I to do with thee,
Thou pierced by nail and bruised by thong?
Yet spare me in my misery,
For I am weak whilst thou art strong.
[39]
Fox-Trot (Dapper Dan)
DISTRESSFULLY aware, he was employed
In dangling clumsy legs into the void,
But the melancholy whistles
Of the ukulele wavered
And a tear-drop semiquavered
From the music, and the thistles
Were extracted
And his feet
Were attracted
By the fleet,
Neat notes ...
Those tightly-fitting pairs of gloves that dance
And beam like a Belasco star
On Broadway, where the houses all advance
To show how very small we are.
And the liquid music throbs
Jujubes,
Crystal-sparkling thoughts in gobs
And cubes—
Flicker-snicker as a scintillating blind
In the breeze,
To appease
The famished Coney Island of the mind.
OH, why was it he looked with such a fierceness the sky?
The rustling of the clouds was pearling grey and silver by,
The lady of the clouds had dropped her muff, but on she trailed,
Her dainty gown was powder-blue, her train was dragon-tailed.
Her face was pale as curds and whey with sleepy-starey look,
The stars they must have bored her, for they were her only book—
And yet she seemed disdainful as the poplars bowed their plumes,
With all the feudal worship that a cloudy queen assumes.
Oh, why was it the poet glanced with envy in his eye
Above him at the clouds a-sailing grey and silver by?
(Rêvons: c’est l’heure—Verlaine)
WE’LL build us stairs of filmy clouds
And mount until the air is clear,
Above this greasy atmosphere
Of callous, artificial crowds.
Away from fœtid cities’ feet
Where, on the asphalt, taxis skate
Like sombre souls who percolate
Through Limbo’s crumbling lazaret.
Away from cities’ clinging noise
And as we are in full ascent
I’ll know the gamut of content
In looking at your perfect poise.
No trees shall pry with envied lust
On too mature a happiness
When I shall taste your lips’ caress,
Unmindful that I sprang from dust.
Courageously, with silent tears
We’ll meet the chaos of the dawn
And silently our hearts shall mourn,
As at an exodus of years.
THE empty trams sing a familiar song
As plaintive as those leaves that once were green
And cling to asphalt, floating else among
The sharp white-pink of quick acetylene.
Like rich saliva sprung from hectic flow’rs
They spray the night with echoing ideas—
Some lose themselves in fickle slanting hours
And some evaporate in pallid fears.
The souls of men have fossilized, grown cold
In this sublimely artificial day,
A criminal’s revolver-crack they hold
Some new device to animate their play!
The lift drops breathless down
And stairs in armies rise.
Then vertigo, the clown
Has caught us in disguise.
I ALWAYS sing into the night
To strangle innermost affright
When faces, twisted masks of lust,
Leer through the murk like yellow dust.
And varnished voices frailly flit
Down shuddering alleys sparsely lit.
Old harlots lurch with ghostly feet
That agonisingly entreat.
I think I’m hearing ever after
The echoes of polluted laughter,
And I can never be alone
But I must hear a hollow groan.
My mind, as in a nightmare, sees
Young bodies rotting with disease,
Strange scabs of mauve and wizened heads,
Sad hospitals with rows of beds....
Is there no harbour, no escape,
Away from whoring, blood and rape?
Two lovers on a bench: and I
Can hear a new-born baby’s cry.
I RAN into the garden, for the breeze
Was clean and keen and warming to the skin
Like some Peruvian pepper soaked in gin
It forced me to contract into a sneeze.
I ran into the garden, for the sky
Was like a freshly-tinted muslin gown
Which makes the choir-boys gape, the parson frown,
His daughters, envying, look on and sigh.
I ran into the garden, for the sun
Summoned the daisies in their new-washed frills,
Summoned the cowslips and the daffodils
To gay Spring’s festival, each one by one.
I watched the blossoms with the dew in pearls,
The Spring puffed flippancies into my mind
And thoughts too abstract to have been defined
By any but the chaffinch twittering.
I WATCHED the dancers as they twirled
Around the candelabra’d room,
And ladies, diamonded, pearled,
Danced to the big brass jazz-band’s boom.
Rustles of skirts, perfumes that pass,
Faces aglow and eyes that beam;
Floors lucid as a looking-glass,
Lips glossy, puffed with crimson cream.
And I am sad, I know not why
With this illusive merriment;
Candles that flicker out and die,
Lilies that wither—youth that’s spent.
[46]
For a Viola-da-gamba
(To be sung by a Eunuch)
I HAVE known beauty
Of skies at eve
Beneath the shadows
That interweave
The boughs that grieve.
I have known beauty
Of suns that set
With fire of amber
And coronet
Of pearl inlet.
I have known beauty
Of fields at dawn
When April shivers
On gilded corn,
And hope is born.
I have known beauty
Of Summer, Spring,
Nebulous Autumn
Cloud gathering
With frail-poised wing.
I have known beauty—
But none so fair
To match the splendour
Of my love’s hair
And snow limbs bare.
(To the sacred memory of Petronius)
AGAIN the agate chalices are filled,
And of a sudden orgiasts are stilled
In wonder, when jet Nubians outpour
The liquid flames instilled from mandragore,
Allured but fearful of their potent sway.
The lantern fruit glow succulent and gay,
Blue-veinéd grapes in massing pendulous,
Small raisins, oranges acidulous
Contracting eyelids till the features wince,
Towering domes of pineapple and quince,
And apples like a film of virgin’s breath,
Strange berries, (you would think they bleed to death!)
Piled pappy plums opaquely amethyst,
Pink furry peaches like a morning mist,
Green mangoes, mellow apricots of gold,
Figs puffed and oozy, melons crystal-cold,
Red mammals of persimmon from the South
And curious pears that glitter in the mouth,
’Mid Tyrian silk, soft laughter, drapery
Of fine-spun damask gleam white napery
Bedizened bosoms, arms baptismal white.
The guests are surfeited with food, and Night
With Sleep and Lust, her ill-assorted sons,
Creeps through the porphyry pavilions.
“Hither and sing, oh Syrian eunuch-boy,
“Those chaste and still-born songs that never cloy
[48]
“The prurient senses kindling in the flesh ...
“Come, Aphrodite, send to me a fresh
“Virginal body for my violence,
“That I may more enjoy the somnolence
“Of after-dreams!”
Thus prayed the men of Tyre
And other towns demolished by God’s ire.
But we to-day have learned and waxed more wise.
We look into dear Lady Dodo’s eyes
And sip champagne and eat our fricassee,
Discuss her spaniel’s noble pedigree;
We praise the chef. “And what a pretty dress!
Worth, dear, or Callot?” (Christ! what bashfulness).
And if we wish to have a little game,
Beguile the night in homes of evil fame.
[49]
The Pensile Gardens of Babylon
THERE beauty’s footsteps lingered in the soft
And poignant semitones that sped aloft,
In perfumes wavering with finger-tips
So faint, they scarcely fluttered on the lips.
There caravans would halt in flame of day
And many turbaned wanderers would stray
To cool their brown-limbed bodies in the deep
And juicy foam of fountains, where would leap
Eternal jets of water-diamonds
Limned intricate like myriad leafy fronds,
Wetting the marble rims with amber showers
Throughout the endless ballet of the hours....
There Bedouins with liquid amorous eyes
Would listen to the piercing notes arise
From shrilly-vivid parokeets, or pause
To overhear the chattering macaws
And watch the cranes with slender, supple necks
Preening the feathered shadows into flecks
Of purpled hues and finest, mordant white,
Or spy the swans ascend in snowy flight
Over the swinging canopy of leaves;
Whither the sky suavely interweaves
A labyrinth of azure-rifted clouds.
Where saffron-throated birds in whirring crowds
Would weep celestial music with their wings,
And tawny monkeys, tiny nimble things,
Would play their melodramas in the trees,
And throbbing swarms of honey-sucking bees
Vibrate the petalled air in droning waves,
And mingle with the murmuring of slaves.
[50]
When shadow night is poisoned by the fangs
Of daily death, with new redoubled pangs
She crackles up in films of aëry haze,
Until the reeling sun with outworn rays
Is hacked to slivers and his regal veins
Spurt crimson jets of flame along the plains,
Suffused to blazing chaos when the sky
Writhes into darkness and her empery.
Then throb the pensile gardens to a swoon,
The great rose-yellow petal of the moon
Curved, white and hovering above the trees,
Shivers a gelid lucency to freeze
The gold of sunset into coldest hues—
A monochrome of silver-tinted blues.
God’s pyrotechnics, shooting star cascades
Splash, sliding, sizzling, ever-whirling blades
Or cataracts and dagger jerks of light
In infinite gyrations down the night.
The hump-backed camels, roding lupanars
Of clouds that lust enamoured of the stars,
Shimmering jewelled pinpricks wistfully
Awed by the vastness and the mystery
Wrapped palpitating round. Then fold on fold
The shoulders of the hills are outlined bold
With pallid smoothness, undulating far
To where the empty, trackless deserts are.
[52]
[53]
Sabbath Morning Rain
LIKE diamond on window pane,
The sky is jagged by spears of rain.
As splashed by layers of grease and lard
The slate-roofs glitter cold and hard.
And people drag their damp-soled feet
Like sacks of dough along the street.
Some orange peel of yesternight
Brightens the gutter’s mud-choked plight.
The ghosts of last night’s riot-spilth
Mingle with puddle, slime and filth.
A lady walks to Church, her pet
White prayer book shielded from the wet.
Umbrella dripping, gloves, frock-coat
A man sails Churchwards like a boat.
Red, smug-faced schoolboys slouch and lurch
Before the grimy Gothic Church.
Soon sound has ceased except th’ inane
Plop-plopping of the Sunday rain.
OH pity me! for day by countless day
And night by night in vain anxiety
I wait for something that will never come.
I long to splutter, crumble, cut the dust,
I long to cleave my prisoners, to gash
Their bleeding entrails, slit their tangled guts
Until they die in anguish on the floor.
A window paralysed and stiffened, I
Must even stare upon the dull world’s form
And watch the doings of a thousand clowns
Repeated lamentably day by day.
Dawn rises not with graceful motion here,
But with policemen plodding on their beat
And whistling apple-faces, clattering
Of milk-cans, painted carts and bicycles;
The water in the closet down below
Continually gingles, splish-a-splash,
And I go mad for very monotones.
The neat grey clerks trip to their offices
Meticulously punctual, little bags
Keep runic-rhythm to their gander steps.
The sun blinds like a harsh electric bulb,
Slicing the street in pools of amber light,
Chipping the railings here and chopping there
The tulips of the houses opposite.
The clock strikes nine and now with sleek top-hats,
The tea and toast still tasting in their mouths,
The Times not full digested in their minds,
The pompous middle-aged to business go
[55]
Soliloquising fondly to themselves
About the new percentage income tax.
Then convex matrons interview the cook.
A sunburnt cretin cringes down below
For pennies, jangling out the tinny notes
Of some old catch of Marie Lloyd that scarce
Can drag a tune from out its crippled box.
Some children skip in time, a monkey bows
And capers to the laughing passers-by.
The cretin then wheels off and all is still
Save for the singing of the charwoman—
“I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,” she sings
With shrill, cracked voice resounding down the street
Like the sharp scrape of tin-tacks desperate,
Persistent in the hollowed crystal air,
Till sounds dissolve to liquid quietude.
The hot dust smeared along the roadway chokes
The sneezing passers-by and slowly mounts
Into their nostril-caves distressingly
Like microscopic gnats, but now there come
Refreshing rumblings from the water-cart,
Which spits small Beardsley-drops about the street
And trickles down into the gutters fast,
Whilst I am left to numbly contemplate
The thin, white apron strings of cloud above,
Until the raucous luncheon-bell once more
Calls upon men to glut themselves with food.
Then hour on hour of thudded octaves; hour
On hour of doddering on yellow keys—
Long, shapeless valses, British Grenadiers,
Whilst water in the closet down below
Persists in gurgling semitone applause.
[56]
The clouds grow sullen and the clerks return
As neat as they set out. But in their minds,
(Impenetrable masks), their tired thoughts
Succeed each other, feeble and fatigued.
One, after supper and a game of whist,
Will rest his run-down clock-work on a bed.
The gas-lamps prick their whiteness in the skies,
The footsteps of a weary harlot’s tread
Remind the street that there is sin abroad.
But dismally sin ever fails to lure
These brazen men from happy families,
Content to snore beneath their handkerchieves.
The clock strikes twelve and I am left alone
To wait for something that will never come....
THE sentries in their boxes,
Like rigid dolls of wood,
In saffron-yellow tunics
Lethargically stood.
The shower had not finished
And still her threaded tears
Fell down like little seconds
Across the flight of years.
The pavement was a mirror
Which caught the jets of light,
The twinkling strings of jewels
That pour from lamps at night.
Suffused among the turrets
A solitary bird
Imprisoned in its feathers
A music faint and blurred....
In bed, I heard the creeping,
The rippling drum of rain
And watched the twilight falling
Upon the window pane.
HERE in an office of sickly greens
Typists tap fast on black machines;
Middle-aged drudges the hour-long day
Hammer their finger-nails away:
I have just come from the country’s crown,
Shropshire, you know, with clouds of down,
This is a change from the gaping sheep
Grazing for ever, half asleep.
I have just come from the country wealds,
Shropshire, you know, with spinach fields,
Men there are honest and plump and red,
Here they are sallow for lack of bread.
But in the office the clock ticks fast
Telling how soon the hours flit past,
Middle-aged drudges the hour-long day
Hammer their pallid lives away.
[59]
Coiffeur Choréographique
To Edith Sitwell
“NEXT gentleman,” the nervous scissors wait
To spoil the hair off some reflecting pate.
“The unemployed, Sir?—half of them are thieves,
Who soil propriety like autumn leaves.”
I wait until my turn. The crack of doom
Summons me from a plush-protected tomb.
“Short round the edge, but not too short will do,
And then I think I’ll have a dry shampoo.”
The scissors ballet-dance about one ear,
Some hairs have fallen down my neck, I fear.
Another pas-de-deux about my eyes—
I do not care for such close harmonies.
But soon the cutting’s done, the barber says:
“The unemployed are dreadful, better days
“May come and make us more content, I hope.”
My head is buried in a cloud of soap,
Till down upon my head Niagara Falls
Descend with all the heat of music halls.
He dries my hair, and as I go he says:
“The unemployed are dreadful, better days——”
I slam the door and wonder, “Will he say
‘The unemployed, Sir,’ on the Judgment Day?”
[60]
L’Impératrice des Pagodes
A POOR, drab slattern washed a greasy plate
Daubed and besmeared with crumbs and margarine,
She had small time to think of tinsel Fate
And yet she sang a Fate that might have been.
When she, the Queen of distant Bangalore,
(She saw it on a coloured map at school)
Would lie with Bob upon a cushioned floor
And jeer at Liza, dubbing her a fool.
When she would bathe her limbs in ode-colone
[2]And promenade in parks with German bands,
When she’d no longer watch the stars alone,
But with Bob’s kisses on her melting hands.
When she could gallop down the Margate beach
And have her “photo” taken on the pier—
(Bob told her once her face was like a peach,
A dubious compliment! to witness here).
And the bank-holidays, the giddy nights
Of merry-goes and switch-backs at Earl’s Court—
The penny-in-the-slot machines, the sights
Of pygmies, men deformed of every sort,
Abnormal women, men with scaley skins
And Esmeraldas wise in magic lore
Would bow to stout Viziers, Moujiks and Djins
Encircling Winnie, Queen of Bangalore!
[61]
A poor, drab slattern washed a greasy plate
Daubed and besmeared with crumbs and margarine,
She had small time to think of tinsel Fate
And yet she sang a Fate that might have been.
[62]
Miss Fay the Trapezist
RED ostrich feathers in her hair,
She balances while people stare
At her pink tights through fœtid waves
Of pulsing awe; they are her slaves.
They are her slaves; she smiles and they
Are near-bewitched to see her sway
Along the slender wire trapeze
Into the card-board painted trees.
The sugared music stops, she stands
Upon her plump and milk-white hands.
Bird-like she rises, blows a kiss
To the spectators, moist with bliss.
The brass band plays a tepid valse
Of sickly syrup-sounds, the false
Pearls of a dowager keep time.
They too were pretty in their prime.
Then the spectators clap, they burst
Applause until a molten thirst
Tugs at their dewlaps, when Miss Fay
Flutters a curtsey to the day.
(The lion-huntress accounts for one of her rather
more unprepossessing guests)
SMALL crumbs of glass he had for eyes
That blinked, myopically wise.
Like midnight suns his laughter froze,
Suavely sterile and morose.
All bistre-brown, an eerie sight,
As shrivelled as a Cenobite
Long vagrant in the Thebaid,
He quite miraculously hid.
But after many years he came
To town, and found it just the same.
He had his hair cut in the Strand
And manicured each psychic hand.
He wrote a book on Cerements
Or some such furtive elements;
He got a title for his pains,
I’m told he has terrific brains!
He had his little eyes exchanged
For larger ones—Mix X. arranged
His skin (enamel so they say!)
And so I had him here to stay.
With eucalyptus in his hair,
He trims his beard if people stare.
He loves to sip beneath the shade
The languid green of lemonade.
[64]
Mr. Bedlam’s Sunday Breakfast
MELANCHOLILY he chipped his morning egg,
So human in its roundness that he felt
A murderer, then lifted the too-small spoon
Brimmed with slippery yolk. “Oh, no you shan’t
Fall on my Sunday best.” How like a woman’s kiss
It seemed to slither nudely down his throat.
Glutinous amber. The tea, when milk had flecked it,
Softening the vulgar cairngorm to a mere distinguished
Nebulosity (pompous), nubiferousness (more pompous still),
Was almost worth the drinking, although it lacked
The romance of being specified Chinese.
The fat round butter with the daisy on it,
The daisy that he would soon decapitate,
Looked over-salted, but then the bread was always
Doughy and void of flavour.
To-day the crust was black, as if the soot
Had fallen on a country thatch ... the marmalade,
Scotch and well streaked, smiled on in invitation.
“My headache’s better now. We won’t be late.
And Dr. Chitty’s preaching on Divorce.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained from the original.
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